Returns to education and skills
Education and the Gender Voting Gap
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWomen in the United States have outpaced men in both voter participation and educational attainment in recent decades. Since education is closely tied to political participation, we consider these trends in tandem and assess how much of the gender gap in voting is attributable to differences in… more →
Do Dual Enrollment Students Realize Better Long-Run Earnings? Variations in Financial Outcomes Among Key Student Groups
Navi Dhaliwal, Sayeeda Jamilah, McKenna Griffin, Dillon Lu, David Mahan, Trey Miller, Holly Kosiewicz.This study considers whether dual enrollment is associated with students’ financial outcomes over a longer, twelve-year time horizon after high school graduation than previously analyzed in the existing literature. Using longitudinal administrative data that span K-12, higher education, and the… more →
The Costs and Benefits of North Carolina’s Early College High School Model
Early colleges are high schools that blend the high school and college experiences. They have been shown to increase college enrollment and completion; however less is known about the costs of the early college model relative to traditional high schools. We leverage randomized assignment of… more →
Return on Investment or Ripoff? Examining the Returns to New Master’s Degree Programs
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceUniversities have created more than 14,000 new master’s degree programs in the last two decades, and much of this is likely driven by an effort to increase institutional revenues during challenging financial times. But this expansion in graduate education creates a risk that these new programs… more →
Do Human Capital Adjustments Protect Youths from Structural Change?
Structural changes to labor demand can have lasting consequences on the employment and earnings of workers in affected industries and geographies. However, individuals coming of age may avoid similar fates if they internalize salient changes to the returns to education and adjust their human… more →
Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital
Topics: Student LearningThe multitude of tasks performed in the labor market requires skills in many dimensions. Traditionally, human capital has been proxied primarily by educational attainment. However, an expanding body of literature highlights the importance of various skill dimensions for success in the labor… more →
The Effects of Losing Pell Grant Eligibility on Student Outcomes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis paper examines the effects of Pell Grant eligibility on student outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design and a partial identification approach, the study provides bounds on the treatment effects that account for selection bias arising from the loss of grant eligibility. While… more →
The Returns to Education over time and the Effect of COVID-19
This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the returns to education in the United States. Using data from the Current Population Survey 2011-2022, the analysis reveals that, after a period of decline, returns to education increased significantly because of COVID, particularly… more →
More Money for Less Time? Examining the Relative and Heterogenous Financial Returns to Non-Degree Credentials and Degree Programs
There is a large and growing number of non-degree credential offerings between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree, as well as degree programs beyond a bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, research on the financial returns to non-degree credentials and degree-granting programs is often… more →
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide… more →
A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence Linking Mathematics and Science Professional Development Interventions to Teacher Knowledge, Classroom Instruction, and Student Achievement
Topics: Student LearningDespite evidence that teacher professional development interventions in mathematics and science can increase student achievement, our understanding of the mechanisms by which this occurs – particularly how these interventions affect teachers themselves, and whether teacher-level changes predict… more →
Education, gender, and family formation
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe study the effect of educational attainment on family formation using regression discontinuity designs generated by centralized admissions processes to both secondary and tertiary education in Finland. Admission to further education at either margin does not increase the likelihood that men… more →
How do hybrid school leaders measure program success? Experimental evidence from a national sample of hybrid schools
Hybrid school enrollments are trending up and many parents express a diverse range of reasons for enrolling their children in hybrid schools. Yet little is known about the pedagogical goals pursued by hybrid schools. We aim to help close this gap in the literature with a stated preferences… more →
The Role of Education-Industry Match in College Earnings Premia
There is substantial variation in the returns to a college degree. One determinant is whether a worker’s employment is “matched” with their education. With a novel education-industry crosswalk and panel data on 295,000 graduates, we provide the first estimates of an education-industry match… more →
The Teacher Labor Market in Context: What We Can Learn from Nurses
Researchers have posited various theories to explain supposed declines in teaching quality: the expansion of labor market opportunities for women, low relative wages, compressed compensation structures, and substituting quantity for quality. We synthesize these previous theories and expand on… more →
The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceEach year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation… more →
Noncredit Workforce Training, Industry Credentials, and Labor Market Outcomes
Many public workforce training programs lead to industry-recognized, third-party awarded credentials, but little research has been conducted on the economic benefits of these credentials in the labor market. This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the labor market returns to industry-… more →
Do Grow-Your-Own Programs Work? Evidence from the Teacher Academy of Maryland
Local teacher recruitment through “grow-your-own” programs is a prominent strategy to address workforce shortages and ensure that incoming teachers resemble, understand, and have strong connections to their communities. We exploit the staggered rollout of the Teacher Academy of Maryland career… more →
Closing the gap for racial minorities and immigrants through school-to-work linkages and occupational match
This study investigates the role of college major choices in labor market outcomes, with a focus on racial minorities and immigrants. Drawing upon research on school-to-work linkages, we examine two measures, linkage, the connection between college majors and specific occupations in the labor… more →
Marginal Returns to Public Universities
This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically… more →