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In this study I examine the relationship between graduating from college with two majors rather than one and labor market earnings using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates. Because institutions are heterogeneous both in terms of overall quality and in the availability of opportunities to double major, I attempt to control for such overarching institutional differences and explore their effects on premiums to completing a double major. On average, I find a double major to earn 3.2 per cent more than his/her single major counterpart. I also find evidence that premiums to double majoring differ across types of institutions: ranging from a near 4 per cent premium at Research and Comprehensive universities to no effect at Liberal Arts colleges. Finally, I investigate the degree to which choices of first and second major academic disciplines affect earnings premiums.

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In this paper [the authors] review recent trends in tuition at public universities and estimate impacts on enrollment. [The authors] use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System on all public four-year colleges and universities from 1991 to 2007 and illustrate that tuition increased dramatically beginning in the early part of this decade, increasing at rates unprecedented in the past half century. [The authors] examine impacts of these tuition increases on total enrollment and credit hours, and estimate differences by type of institution. [The authors] estimate that the average tuition and fee elasticity of total headcount is -0.1072. So, at the mean a $100 increase in tuition and fees (in 2006 dollars) would lead to a decline in enrollment of a little more than 0.25 per cent, with larger effects at Research I universities. [The authors] find no evidence that especially large increases from one year to the next have a disproportionately large negative effect on enrollment.

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In this paper we review recent increases in tuition at public institutions and estimate impacts on enrollment. We use data on all US public 4-year colleges and universities from 1991 to 2006 and illustrate that tuition increased dramatically beginning in the early part of this decade. We examine impacts of such increases on total enrollment and credit hours, and estimate differences by type of institution. We estimate that the average tuition and fee elasticity of total headcount is -0.0958. At the mean, a USD100 increase in tuition and fees would lead to a decline in enrollment of about 0.25 per cent, with larger effects at Research I universities. We find limited evidence that especially large tuition increases elicit disproportionate enrollment responses.

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Dual-credit courses expose high school students to college-level content and provide the opportunity to earn college credits, in part to smooth the transition to college. With the Tennessee Department of Education, we conduct the first randomized controlled trial of the effects of dual-credit math coursework on a range of high school and college outcomes. We find that the dual-credit advanced algebra course alters students' subsequent high school math course-taking, reducing enrollment in remedial math and boosting enrollment in precalculus and Advanced Placement math courses. We fail to detect an effect of the dual-credit math course on overall rates of college enrollment. However, the course induces some students to choose four-year universities instead of two-year colleges, particularly for those in the middle of the math achievement distribution and those first exposed to the opportunity to take the course in 11th rather than 12th grade. We see limited evidence of improvements in early math performance during college.

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This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data to measure a variety of [US] postsecondary outcomes. [The authors] first describe the history of the NSC, the basic structure of its data, and recent research interest in using NSC data. Second, using information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), [the authors] calculate enrollment coverage rates for NSC data over time, by state, institution type, and demographic student subgroups. [The authors] find that coverage is highest among public institutions and lowest (but growing) among for-profit colleges. Across students, enrollment coverage is lower for minorities but similar for males and females. [The authors] also explore two potentially less salient sources of non-coverage: suppressed student records due to privacy laws and matching errors due to typographic inaccuracies in student names. To illustrate how this collection of measurement errors may affect estimates of the levels and gaps in postsecondary attendance and persistence, [the authors] perform several case-study analyses using administrative transcript data from Michigan public colleges. [They] close with a discussion of practical issues for program evaluators using NSC data.

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Career academies serve an increasingly wide range of students. This paper examines the contemporary profile of students entering career academies in a large, diverse school district and estimates causal effects of participation in one of the district's well-regarded academies on a range of high school and college outcomes. Exploiting the lottery-based admissions process of this technology-focused academy, we find that academy enrollment increases the likelihood of high school graduation by about 8 percentage points and boosts rates of college enrollment for males but not females. Analysis of intermediate outcomes suggests that effects on attendance and industry-relevant certification at least partially mediate the overall high school graduation effect.

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A related report published by the authors in 2017, 'Building better bridges to life after high school: experimental evidence on contemporary career academies', is available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 128.834. Show less

Modern career academies aim to prepare students for college and the labor market. This paper examines the profile of students entering such academies in one school district and estimates causal effects of participation in one of the district's well-regarded academies on a range of high school and college outcomes. Using administrative data from the Wake County Public School System, [the authors] find that students who enter contemporary career academies are generally higher performing than their non-academy peers. Further, [the authors] document that Hispanic students and those with limited English proficiency are somewhat less likely to enroll than other students, even after [controlling] for differences in prior academic achievement and high school choice sets. Exploiting the lottery-based admissions process of one technology-focused academy, [the authors] then estimate causal effects of participation in a career academy on high school attendance, achievement, and graduation, as well as college-going.

[The authors] find that enrollment in this academy increases the likelihood of high school graduation and college enrollment each by about eight percentage points, with the attainment gains concentrated among male students. [The authors] also find that academy participation reduces ninth grade absences but has little influence on academic performance, [Advanced Placement] AP course-taking, or AP exam success during high school. Analysis of candidate mechanisms suggests that roughly one fifth of the overall high school graduation effect can be attributed to improved student engagement in high school.

Published abstract.

This working paper was originally released in January 2017 and revised in August 2018. Show less

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn, general majors - Business and General Engineering - have skill profiles similar to all majors; Nursing and Education are specialized. These cross-major differences in skill profiles explain considerable wage variation, with little role for within-major differences in skills across areas. College majors can thus be reasonably conceptualized as portable bundles of skills.

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This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 per cent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 per cent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of 'brain drain' across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

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How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure-track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.

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