Research Areas

Students are typically given a large amount of freedom to choose the level of “curricular dispersion:” the tight focus or lack thereof in the courses they elect to take while in college. There is little evidence about what predicts students’ curricular dispersion, whether it affects later college or labor force outcomes, or, in fact, how to measure curricular dispersion. In this paper we develop a measure of curricular dispersion and use data from Washington State to explore its predictors and associated outcomes. We find that prior dispersion predicts future dispersion but not subsequent changes in college major. We report mixed findings on the associations between curricular dispersion and overall college GPA, the probability of graduation, and early career wages.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, James Cowan, Mark C. Long, Nick Huntington-Klein (2015). College Curricular Dispersion: More Well Rounded or Less Well Trained?. CALDER Working Paper No. 130

I investigate the determinants of high school completion and college attendance, the likelihood of taking science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) courses in the first year of college and the probability of earning a degree in a STEM field. The focus is on women and minorities, who tend to be underrepresented in STEM fields. Tracking four cohorts of students throughout Florida, I find that large differences in math achievement across racial lines exist as early as elementary school and persist through high school. These achievement differences lead to higher drop-out rates in high school and a reduced probability of attending college for black students. However, conditional on immediately attending a four-year college after high school, black and Hispanic students are more likely than whites to take STEM courses during their first year in college. Increased exposure to Hispanic math and science teachers in middle and high school tends to increase the likelihood that Hispanic students take STEM courses during their first year in college, though pairing black students and black math/science teachers does not have the same positive effect. For all students, having high school math and science teachers with a degree in biology, chemistry or math (as opposed to education) is associated with a higher likelihood of taking STEM courses as college freshmen. When pre-college differences in income and math achievement are taken into account, black and Hispanic students are at least as likely as white students to successfully complete a STEM major. Racial/ethnic pairing of students and college instructors in first-year STEM courses does not increase the likelihood of majoring in a STEM field. In contrast to underrepresented minorities, women perform nearly as well as men on math achievement tests through high school and are more likely to finish high school and attend college than males. Among college students, however, women are less likely than men to take courses in the physical sciences in their first year and are less likely to earn a degree in physics or engineering, even after adjusting for pre-college test scores. Gender matching of students and math/science teachers in middle and high school tends to increase the likelihood that female college freshman will take at least one STEM course, However, conditional on first-year coursework, neither gender matching at the secondary or college levels appears to have any effect on the likelihood of completing a major in a STEM field.

Citation: Tim Sass (2015). Understanding the STEM Pipeline. CALDER Working Paper No. 125

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for-profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all. 

Citation: Rajeev Darolia, Cory Koedel, Paco Martorell, Katie Wilson, Francisco Perez-Arce (2014). Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For-Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment. CALDER Working Paper No. 116

This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate the effect of college quality on the distribution of earnings. We proxy for college quality using the college sector from which students graduate and focus on identifying how graduating from UT-Austin, Texas A&M or a community college affects the distribution of earnings relative to graduating from a non-flagship university in Texas. Our methodological approach uses the rich set of observable student academic ability and background characteristics in the data to adjust the earnings distributions across college sectors for the fact that college sector quality is correlated with factors that also affect earnings. Although our mean earnings estimates are similar to previous work in this area, we find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the returns to college quality. At UT-Austin, the returns increase across the earnings distribution, while at Texas A&M they tend to decline with one’s place in the distribution. For community college graduates, the returns relative to non-flagship four-year graduates are negative across most of the distribution of earnings, but they approach zero and become positive for higher earners. Our data also allow us to estimate effects separately by race and ethnicity, and we find that historically under-represented minorities experience the highest returns in the upper tails of the earnings distribution, particularly among UT-Austin and community college graduates. While we focus on graduates, we also show our estimates are robust to examining college attendees as well as to many other changes in the sample and to the estimation strategy. Overall, these estimates provide the first direct evidence of the extent of heterogeneity in the effect of college quality on subsequent earnings, and our estimates point to the need to consider such heterogeneity in human capital models that incorporate college quality.

Citation: Rodney J. Andrews, Jing Li, Michael Lovenheim (2014). Quantile Treatment Effects of College Quality on Earnings: Evidence from Administrative Data in Texas. CALDER Working Paper No. 108

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,000 in 40 states, serving more than 2 million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on student earnings, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Chicago and Florida, we find evidence that charter high schools may have substantial positive effects on persistence in college as well as high-school graduation and college entry. In Florida, where we can link students to workforce data in adulthood, we also find evidence that charter high schools produce large positive effects on subsequent earnings.

Citation: Kevin Booker, Tim Sass, Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer (2014). Charter High Schools' Effect on Long-Term Attainment and Earnings. CALDER Working Paper No. 103

In this paper we will briefly review recent trends in employment outcomes for disadvantaged youth, focusing specifically on those who have become "disconnected" from school and the labor market, and why these trends have occurred. We then review a range of policy prescriptions that might improve those outcomes. These policies include: 1) Efforts to enhance education and employment outcomes, both among in-school youth who are at risk of dropping out and becoming disconnected as well as out-of-school youth who have already done so; 2) Policies to increase earnings and incent more labor force participation among youth, such as expanding the eligibility of childless adults (and especially non-custodial parents) for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); and 3) Specific policies to reduce barriers to employment faced by ex-offenders and non-custodial parents (NCPs). We also consider policies that target the demand side of the labor market, in efforts to spur the willingness of employers to hire these young people and perhaps to improve the quality of jobs available to them.

Citation: Peter B. Edelman, Harry Holzer (2013). Connecting the Disconnected: Improving Education and Employment Outcomes Among Disadvantaged Youth. CALDER Working Paper No. 96

This paper assesses the extent to which schools in the University of California (UC) system were able to restore racial diversity among admitted students using race-neutral polices after California’s ban on race-based affirmative action. Using administrative data from the UC from before and after the ban on race-contingent admissions policies, we present evidence that UC campuses changed the weight given to SAT scores, grades and family background characteristics after the end of affirmative action, and that these changes were able to substantially (though far from completely) offset the fall in minority admissions rate after the ban on affirmative action. In addition, we explore the possible inefficiencies generated by these changes in the admissions process, and find that while the new admissions rules affected the composition of admitted students, it is not clear that overall student quality declined. These results have important implications in light of the declining number of public universities in the United States that practice race-based affirmative action.

Citation: Kate Antonovics, Benjamin Backes (2013). Color-Blind Affirmative Action and Student Quality. CALDER Working Paper No. 93

Stagnant earnings and growing inequality in the US labor market reflect both a slowdown in the growth of worker skills and the growing matching of good-paying jobs to skilled workers. Improving the ties between colleges, workforce institutions, and employers would help more workers gain the needed skills. Evaluation evidence shows that training programs linked to employers and good-paying jobs are often cost-effective. Helping more states develop such programs and systems would help raise worker earnings and reduce inequality.

Citation: Harry Holzer (2012). Good Workers for Good Jobs: Improving Education and Workforce Systems in the US. CALDER Working Paper No. 85

Community colleges are complex organizations and assessing their performance, though important, is difficult. Compared to four-year colleges and universities, community colleges serve a more diverse population and provide a wider variety of educational programs that include continuing education and technical training for adults, and diplomas, associates degrees, and transfer credits for recent high school graduates. Focusing solely on the latter programs of North Carolina’s community colleges, we measure the success of each college along two dimensions: attainment of an applied diploma, or degree; or completion of the coursework required to transfer to a four-year college or university. We address three questions. First, how much variation is there across the institutions in these measures of student success? Second, how do these measures of success differ across institutions after we adjust for the characteristics of the enrolled students? Third, how do our measures compare to the measures of success used by the North Carolina Community College System? We find that most of the system’s colleges cannot be statistically distinguished from one another along either dimension.

Citation: Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, Clara Muschkin, Jacob Vigdor (2012). Success in Community College: Do Institutions Differ?. CALDER Working Paper No. 74