The role of learning in returns to college major: evidence from 2.8 million reviews of 150,000 professors
Vitaliy Novik
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
Why do some college majors have much higher returns than others? I ask if differences in returns are due to differences in quality of education across majors. I use a novel dataset in which college students rate courses and professors on difficulty, the level of effort required to obtain an A. Major difficulty correlates positively with study hours, implying students respond to grading standards when choosing study time. Using the American Community Survey, I show that harder majors earn more, under a variety of specifications. To deal with selection concerns I use the College Scorecard to compare graduates from the same university-major but exposed to harder or easier professors due to being in different graduation year cohorts. Those exposed to harder professors earn more one year after graduation. I also use the NLSY97 panel to estimate an event study, finding that difficulty causes lower earnings while in college but higher earnings after graduation and provides access to higher skilled occupations. I estimate that one-third of the variance in returns to major can be explained by differences in learning as proxied by difficulty.
Keywords: human capital; returns to major; college educaticn (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/115431/1/MPRA_paper_115431.pdf original version (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:115431
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).