Social Study
College and the "Culture War": Assessing Higher Education's Influence on Moral Attitudes
Miloš Broćić & Andrew Miles
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Moral differences contribute to social and political conflicts. Against this backdrop, colleges and universities have been criticized for promoting liberal moral attitudes. However, direct evidence for these claims is sparse, and suggestive evidence from studies of political attitudes is inconclusive. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we examine the effects of higher education on attitudes related to three dimensions of morality that have been identified as central to conflict: moral relativism, concern for others, and concern for social order. Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism. These effects are strongest for individuals majoring in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and for students pursuing graduate studies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for work on political conflict and moral socialization.
Why Does Education Increase Voting? Evidence from Boston's Charter Schools
Sarah Cohodes & James Feigenbaum
NBER Working Paper, September 2021
Abstract:
In the United States, people with more education vote more. But, we know little about why education increases political participation or whether higher-quality education increases civic participation. We study applicants to Boston charter schools, using school lotteries to estimate charter attendance impacts for academic and voting outcomes. First, we confirm large academic gains for students in the sample of charter schools and cohorts investigated here. Second, we find that charter attendance boosts voter participation. Voting in the first presidential election after a student turns 18 increased substantially, by six percentage points from a base of 35 percent. The voting effect is driven entirely by girls and there is no increase in voter registration. Rich data and the differential effects by gender enable exploration of multiple potential channels for the voting impact. We find evidence consistent with two mechanisms: charter schools increase voting by increasing students' noncognitive skills and by politicizing families who participate in charter school education.
Same major, same economic returns? College selectivity and earnings inequality in young adulthood
Natasha Quadlin, Emma Cohen & Tom VanHeuvelen
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, October 2021
Abstract:
Fields of study are a persistent source of inequality among college graduates in the U.S., but surprisingly few studies have investigated factors that predict earnings within these fields. In this article, we focus on one dimension that has been central to studies of inequality in higher education - college selectivity - to examine how young adult earnings are stratified among college graduates who majored in the same fields, using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS; N = 2,952). We also assess gender differences in the relationships between fields of study, college selectivity, and earnings, given that gender is a consistent predictor of both majors and earnings. After accounting for selection bias using propensity score matching techniques, we find that recent college graduates in only two majors - business and the social sciences - experience a selectivity premium. Additionally, we find key gender differences in the majors that give rise to these premiums. Both men and women experience a selectivity premium in business and the social sciences, but within STEM fields, men benefit from a prestigious degree, but women do not. This finding underscores recent research showing that high-performing men in STEM fields receive outsized rewards relative to their women counterparts, thus deepening gender inequality in fields where women are underrepresented and assigned low expectations for performance.
Opportunity Unraveled: Private Information and the Missing Markets for Financing Human Capital
Daniel Herbst & Nathaniel Hendren
NBER Working Paper, September 2021
Abstract:
Investing in college carries high returns, but comes with considerable risk. Financial products like equity contracts can mitigate this risk, yet college is typically financed through non-dischargeable, government-backed student loans. This paper argues that adverse selection has unraveled private markets for college-financing contracts that mitigate risk. We use survey data on students' expected post-college outcomes to estimate their knowledge about future outcomes, and we translate these estimates into their implication for adverse selection of equity contracts and several state-contingent debt contracts. We find students hold significant private knowledge of their future earnings, academic persistence, employment, and loan repayment likelihood, beyond what is captured by observable characteristics. For example, our empirical results imply that a typical college-goer must expect to pay back $1.64 in present value for every $1 of equity financing to cover the financier's costs of covering those who would adversely select their contract. We estimate that college-goers are not willing to accept these terms so that private markets unravel. Nonetheless, our framework quantifies significant welfare gains from government subsidies that would open up these missing markets and partially insure college-going risks.
The Minimum Wage and Teen Educational Attainment
Alexander Smith
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Teen employment effects are central to the minimum wage debate, but important indirect effects on education receive relatively little attention. I investigate the effect of changes in the minimum wage on high school dropout decisions. Consistently across two sources of variation and three individual-level datasets, I find that increases in the minimum wage substantially reduce the dropout likelihood of low-socioeconomic status (SES) teens but have no effect on other teens.
Why Don't Elite Colleges Expand Supply?
Peter Blair & Kent Smetters
NBER Working Paper, September 2021
Abstract:
While college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates. We show that straightforward reasons cannot explain this behavior. We propose a model where colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or relative admit rates. A key comparative static of the model is that higher demand decreases [increases] the admit rate when the weight on prestige is above [below] a critical value, consistent with experience in elite [non-elite] colleges. A calibrated version of the model closely replicates the pattern in the data of declining admit rates at elite colleges while counter-factual simulations without prestige fail. Prestige competition is inefficient. Allowing elite colleges to collude on admissions strategy internalizes the non-pecuniary prestige externality and is Pareto improving.
The Effect of Replications on Citation Patterns: Evidence From a Large-Scale Reproducibility Project
Felix Schafmeister
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Replication of existing research is often referred to as one of the cornerstones of modern science. In this study, I tested whether the publication of independent replication attempts affects the citation patterns of the original studies. Investigating 95 replications conducted in the context of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, I found little evidence for an adjustment of citation patterns in response to the publication of these independent replication attempts. This finding was robust to the choice of replication criterion, various model specifications, and the composition of the contrast group. I further present some suggestive evidence that shifts in the underlying composition of supporting and disputing citations have likely been small. I conclude with a review of the evidence in favor of the remaining explanations and discuss the potential consequences of these findings for the workings of the scientific process.
Collateral Consequences of School Suspension: Examining the 'Knifing off' Hypothesis
Abigail Novak & Marvin Krohn
American Journal of Criminal Justice, October 2021, Pages 728-747
Abstract:
School exclusionary practices are routinely used in response to undesired behaviors in the school environment and have been shown to have resulted in unintentional or collateral consequences for youth, including increased risk of arrest, offending behavior, and incarceration. Little research has been done on how school exclusion impacts interaction with prosocial peers and involvement in prosocial opportunities. This study applies the labeling perspective's knifing off concept to examine whether prosocial exposures and deviant peer associations mediate the relationship between school suspension, arrest, and offending behavior. Using data from the LONGSCAN study, we examined whether suspension led to changes in prosocial peer association and activity involvement, increases in deviant peer association, and ultimately arrest and offending behavior. Results provided support for the labeling perspective's hypotheses, finding school suspension was indirectly associated with both arrest and offending behavior via decreases in prosocial exposures and increases in deviant peer associations. Findings suggest policy makers should consider alternatives to school suspension where possible to avoid collateral consequences like reductions in prosocial exposures and deviant peer associations and should consider applying restorative approaches following a suspension experience to reintegrate youth into prosocial communities.
Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?
Sarah Komisarow & Robert Gonzalez
Education Finance and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation. We discuss and explore potential channels to explain this and believe our results are most consistent with improved neighborhood conditions in the form of reduced crime as an underlying mechanism.
The Returns to College(s): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education
Jack Mountjoy & Brent Hickman
NBER Working Paper, September 2021
Abstract:
Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the state of Texas, we identify relative college value-added by comparing the outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances observable student potential across college treatments and renders our extensive set of covariates irrelevant as controls. Methodologically, we develop a framework for identifying and interpreting value-added under varying assumptions about match effects and sorting gains. Empirically, we estimate a relatively tight, though non-degenerate, distribution of relative value-added across the wide diversity of Texas public universities. Selectivity poorly predicts value-added within student choice sets, with only a fleeting selectivity earnings premium fading to zero after a few years in the labor market. Non-peer college inputs like instructional spending more strongly predict value-added, especially conditional on selectivity. Colleges that boost BA completion, especially in STEM majors, also tend to boost earnings. Finally, we probe the potential for (mis)match effects by allowing value-added schedules to vary by student characteristics.
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity-Driven School Reassignments
Thurston Domina et al.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of reassignment on reassigned students' achievement, attendance, and exposure to exclusionary discipline. Between 2000 and 2010, North Carolina's Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) reassigned approximately 25 percent of students with the goal of creating socioeconomically diverse schools. Although WCPSS's controlled school choice policy provided opportunities for reassigned students to opt out of their newly reassigned schools, our analysis indicates that reassigned students typically attended their newly reassigned schools. We find that reassignment modestly boosts reassigned students' math achievement, reduces reassigned students' rate of suspension, and has no offsetting negative consequences on other outcomes. Exploratory analyses suggest that the effects of reassignment do not meaningfully vary by student characteristics or school choice decisions. The results suggest that carefully designed school assignment policies can improve school diversity without imposing academic or disciplinary costs on reassigned students.
Student Debt and Geographic Disadvantage: Disparities by Rural, Suburban, and Urban Background
Alec Rhodes
Rural Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
American youth from rural backgrounds have made great strides to overcome challenges in college enrollment and completion since the 2000s. Yet little is known about how rural youth are financing these attainment increases -- a pressing question in light of high college costs, rising student debt, and spatial inequality in the resources that students have to pay for college. This paper examines disparities in young adults' student debt by geographic background using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort. Regression analyses reveal that college-goers from rural backgrounds accumulate more debt than those from suburban and urban backgrounds, adjusting for differences in sociodemographic characteristics. Rural college-goers' higher debt can be partially attributed to differences in socioeconomic backgrounds and rates of inter-county migration during college, and there is evidence that the additive influences of geographic background and gender contribute to particularly high debt among rural women. The findings suggest that longstanding spatial inequalities contribute to disparities in student debt and raise questions about the experiences of rural youth and communities in a debt-based society.
Kindergarten in a Large Urban District
Mimi Engel et al.
Educational Researcher, August 2021, Pages 401-415
Abstract:
Using data from 82 classroom observations conducted in a large urban school district, we explore how kindergartners spend their time in general and across schools serving children from lower and higher income households. Consistent with prior research, we find that kindergartners spend the majority of instructional time on reading and mathematics, with little time devoted to other subjects. On average, 2.5 hours are spent on noninstructional activities such as transitions. Kindergartners in lower income schools spend more time on reading and mathematics and experience more noninstructional time. They also spend substantially less time being physically active and have fewer opportunities to choose their own activities than their peers in higher income schools.
Teacher-Student Neural Coupling During Teaching and Learning
Mai Nguyen et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human communication is remarkably versatile, enabling teachers to share highly abstracted and novel information with their students. What neural processes enable such transfer of information across brains during naturalistic teaching and learning? Here, a teacher was scanned in fMRI giving an oral lecture with slides on a scientific topic followed by a review lecture. Students were then scanned watching either the intact lecture and review (N = 20) or a temporally scrambled version of the lecture (N = 20). Using intersubject correlation (ISC), we observed widespread teacher-student neural coupling spanning sensory cortex and language regions along the superior temporal sulcus as well as higher-level regions including posterior medial cortex (PMC), superior parietal lobule (SPL), and dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Teacher-student alignment in higher-level areas was not observed when learning was disrupted by temporally scrambling the lecture. Moreover, teacher-student coupling in PMC was significantly correlated with learning: the more closely the student's brain mirrored the teacher's brain, the more the student improved their learning score. Together, these results suggest that the alignment of neural responses between teacher and students may reflect effective communication of complex information across brains in classroom settings.