The Relationship Between Family Income and Schooling Attainment: Evidence from a Liberal Arts College with a Full Tuition Subsidy Program

Todd Stinebrickner and Ralph Stinebrickner

No 20008, University of Western Ontario, Departmental Research Report Series from University of Western Ontario, Department of Economics

Abstract: Researchers have long been interested in understanding why a Strong relationship between family income and educational attainment exists at virtually all levels of schooling. In part due to a recent increase in the disparity between the wages of college graduates and the wages of individuals with less than a college degree, there has been a specific interest in understanding why individuals from low income families are less likely to graduate from college than other students. Using unique new data obtained directly from a liberal arts school that maintains a full tuition subsidy program, this paper provides direct evidence that family environment reasons that are unrelated to the tuition costs of college are very important. The paper pays close attention to the issue of selection bias by deriving a set of seemingly very plausible conditions under which the estimator of interest is "conservative". The findings, which suggest that non-trivial differences in educational attainment would exist even if tuition was zero for all students, have implications for expensive policy programs such as the full tuition subsidy program that was recently approved by the state of California.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1352&context=economicsresrpt (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:uwo:uwowop:20008

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://economics.uw ... itting_ordering.html
The price is Paper copy available by mail at a cost of $10.00 Canadian each.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Western Ontario, Departmental Research Report Series from University of Western Ontario, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().