Intended College Attendance: Evidence from an Experiment on College Returns and Cost

Zachary Bleemer () and Basit Zafar

No 9445, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the US have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps – specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs – as a potential explanation for these patterns. For this purpose, we conduct an information experiment about college returns and costs embedded within a representative survey of US household heads. We show that, at the baseline, perceptions of college costs and benefits are severely and systematically biased: 75 percent of our respondents underestimate college returns (defined as average earnings of a college graduate relative to a non-college worker in the population), while 61 percent report net public college costs that exceed actual net costs. There is also substantial heterogeneity in beliefs, with evidence of larger biases among lower-income and non-college households. We also elicit respondents' intended likelihood of their pre-college age child attending college, and the likelihood of them recommending college for a friend's child, the two main behavioral outcomes of interest. Respondents are then randomly exposed to one of two information treatments, which respectively provide objective information about "college returns" and "college costs". We find a significant impact on intended college attendance for individuals in the returns experiment: intended college attendance expectations increase by about 0.2 of the standard deviation in the baseline likelihood. Importantly, as a result of the college returns information intervention, gaps in intended college attendance by household income or parents' education persist but decline by 20-30 percent. Notably, the effect of information persists in the medium-term, two months after the intervention. We, however, find no impact of the cost information treatment on college attendance expectations.

Keywords: information; college returns and costs; college enrollment; subjective expectations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 D83 D84 I21 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published - published in: Journal of Public Economics, 2018, 157, 184-211

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9445.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Intended college attendance: Evidence from an experiment on college returns and costs (2018)
Working Paper: Intended college attendance: evidence from an experiment on college returns and costs (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:iza:izadps:dp9445

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().