College Quality and Attendance Patterns: A Long-Run View

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hendricks, Lutz; Herrington, Christopher; Schoellman, Todd
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; Virginia Commonwealth University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Minneapolis
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20190154
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 184-215
• 关键词: educational-attainment; US

摘要

We construct a time series of college attendance patterns for the United States and document a reversal: family background was a better predictor of college attendance before World War II, but academic ability was afterward. We construct a model of college choice that explains this reversal. The model's central mechanism is that an exogenous surge of college attendance leads better colleges to be oversubscribed, institute selective admissions, and raise their quality relative to their peers, as in Hoxby (2009). Rising quality at better colleges attracts high-ability students, while falling quality at the remaining colleges dissuades low-ability students, generating the reversal.