Community Colleges and Upward Mobility

Jack Mountjoy

No 29254, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of 2-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value-added for 2-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate 4-year entry.

JEL-codes: C31 C36 I23 I24 I26 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-isf, nep-lma and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as Jack Mountjoy, 2022. "Community Colleges and Upward Mobility," American Economic Review, vol 112(8), pages 2580-2630.

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