A Quality-Preserving Increase in Four-Year College Attendance: Evidence from NLS-72 and ELS:2002

Robert Archibald (), David Feldman and Peter McHenry ()
Additional contact information
Robert Archibald: Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

No 147, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: We use the NLS-72 and ELS:2002 data sets to evaluate changes in the college matching process. Rising attendance rates at four-year institutions have not decreased average preparedness of college goers or of college graduates, and further attendance gains are possible before diminishing returns sets in. We use multinomial logit models to demonstrate that measures of likely success (GPA) became more predictive of college attendance over time, while other student characteristics such as race and parents’ education became less predictive. Our evidence suggests that schools have become better at sorting while students have efficiently responded to changes in the return to higher education.

Keywords: higher education; human capital; college attendance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 J1 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2015-06-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp147_rev.pdf (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:cwm:wpaper:147

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Alfredo Pereira ().