A New Measure of College Quality to Study the Effects of College Sector and Peers on Degree Attainment

Jonathan Smith and Kevin Stange

Education Finance and Policy, 2016, vol. 11, issue 4, 369-403

Abstract: Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate than similar students who start at a four-year college, but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. This paper investigates the attainment consequences of sector choice and peer quality among recent high school graduates. Using data on all Preliminary SAT (PSAT) test-takers between 2004 and 2006, we develop a novel measure of peer ability for most two-year and four-year colleges in the United States—the average PSAT of enrolled students. We document substantial variation in this measure of peer quality across two-year colleges and nontrivial overlap between the two-year and four-year sectors. We find that half the gap in bachelor's degree attainment rates across sectors is explained by differences in peers, leaving room for structural barriers to transferring between institutions to also play an important role.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/EDFP_a_00209 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A New Measure of College Quality to Study the Effects of College Sector and Peers on Degree Attainment (2015)
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:tpr:edfpol:v:11:y:2016:i:4:p:369-403

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().