Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor

Susan Dynarski

No 11604, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Half of college students drop out before completing a degree. These low rates of college completion among young people should be viewed in the context of slow future growth in the educated labor force, as the well-educated baby boomers retire and new workers are drawn from populations with historically low education levels. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and the share of workers with a college education. I exploit the introduction of two large tuition subsidy programs, finding that they increase the share of the population that completes a college degree by three percentage points. The effects are strongest among women, with white women increasing degree receipt by 3.2 percentage points and the share of nonwhite women attempting or completing any years of college increasing by six and seven percentage points, respectively. A cost-benefit analysis indicates that tuition reduction can be a socially efficient method for increasing college completion. However, even with the offer of free tuition, a large share of students continue to drop out, suggesting that the direct costs of school are not the only impediment to college completion.

JEL-codes: I21 I22 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published as Susan Dynarski, 2008. "Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 43(3), pages 576-610.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11604.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor (2005)
Working Paper: Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor (2005)
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:nbr:nberwo:11604

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11604

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().