ERIC Number: ED579990
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Jun
Pages: 40
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data. NBER Working Paper No. 17159
Dale, Stacy; Krueger, Alan B.
National Bureau of Economic Research
We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C&B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data. We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.
Descriptors: Outcomes of Education, Education Work Relationship, Income, Selective Admission, College Admission, College Students, Cohort Analysis, Surveys, Institutional Characteristics, Colleges, Minority Group Students, College Entrance Examinations, Educational Attainment, Parent Background, Regression (Statistics), Statistical Analysis
National Bureau of Economic Research. 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398. Tel: 617-588-0343; Web site: http://www.nber.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Authoring Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: SAT (College Admission Test)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
IES Cited: ED573046
Author Affiliations: N/A