Why Do Employers Pay For College?

Peter Cappelli

No 9225, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Employers routinely provide financial support for their employees who pursue post-secondary education despite the fact that it represents perhaps the classic example of a general skill' that costs the employer money and raises the market wages of employees who possess it. The analysis below examines why employers provide such support, and the results suggest that employees do not pay for tuition assistance through below market or training wages, the typical arrangement for funding general skills training. Instead, tuition assistance appears to select better quality employees who stay on the job longer, at least in part to keep making use of that benefit.

JEL-codes: I2 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mic
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Cappelli, Peter. “Why Do Employers Pay for College?” Journal of Econometrics 121, 1-2 (August 2004): 213-241.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9225.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:nbr:nberwo:9225

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9225

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 ().