Community Colleges and Upward Mobility

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mountjoy, Jack
• 署名单位: University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181756
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 2580-2630
• 关键词: local instrumental variables; in-kind; returns; Heterogeneity; models; distributions; education; QUALITY; tuition; skills

摘要

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from four-year institutions cast ambiguity over two-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of two-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value added for two-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate four-year entry.