The Life-Long Effects of Attending an Elite University
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Alternative Title |
| |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.21036/LTPUB10837 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
01:05
Meeting/Interview
03:35
Meeting/Interview
06:04
Meeting/Interview
08:17
Meeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
In our paper, we are analyzing the long-run effects of elite higher education. In particular, we are looking at the effects in the marriage market and in terms of intergenerational outcomes. In terms of marriage market outcomes, we are looking at the decision to get married. We want to know whether being admitted to a more elite university affects your decision to get married,
00:26
but also affects your decision who to get married to. That is, we are interested in whether the characteristics of the spouse are different if you are admitted to a more elite institution. In the second area, we are looking at the outcomes on children,
00:42
and we are interested in whether being admitted to a more elite institution affects people's decision to have children, the number of children they have, the timing of the children, but also the characteristics of the children. That is how good children's opportunities are later in life. We capture this by looking at basically their performance on standardized test scores.
01:08
To address our research question of interest to understand the long-run effects of elite education, we are facing two important challenges. One is the identification challenge to identify a causal effect of elite education,
01:22
and secondly, there are important data requirements. Concerning the first part, it is important to identify a causal effect of attending a more elite university, because the people who attend those universities tend to be selected into them. So their characteristics are different from the characteristics of people not attending these universities,
01:43
which would make their long-run outcomes already different, even without attending any elite institution at all. We are making use of a context where people are centrally assigned to universities based on individuals' preferences over universities and their university entrance test score.
02:02
Everyone who is interested in a certain institution enters a list, is ranked according to their entrance test score. If the institution has 100 slots, for example, the first 100 highest performing applicants are admitted. Person number 101 is not admitted, and so the method is comparing basically the outcomes of the individual
02:23
who just admitted into the more elite institution versus those that just missed the cut-off. And those guys are very similar in terms of their characteristics, ex ante, but differ in terms of the treatment, they differ in terms of having attended the elite institution or not.
02:41
This leads me to the second challenge, which is related to data requirement. So the method that we're using is a regression discontinuity design. In order to compare people at those thresholds, we need a very big data set. We need basically administrative data on university applicants. We need to be able to follow them until basically their 40s or so to observe their marriage and fertility decisions.
03:06
And in order to do so, we use historic data on university applicants in the early 90s, which we scanned and digitized. In addition, in order to match this information with basically people's long-run outcomes in terms of spouses and children,
03:24
we managed to convince the Ministry of Justice in Chile to match us this data. And so we have information also on spouses and children's outcomes. I'm going to talk about our findings in the marriage market, our findings in terms of intergenerational effects,
03:44
and then I'll briefly talk about the mechanisms behind those effects that we find. Firstly, we find very important marriage market returns to being admitted to a more elite university, but only on the part of women. Women who are admitted to a more elite university have husbands who are substantially smarter
04:03
in terms of having a high university entrance score. They are more likely to have attended a top institution, and they come from a more privileged family background. For men, we don't find these type of effects. Secondly, we're looking at children's outcomes, so we do not find any effects in terms of fertility,
04:24
no differences in terms of the likelihood to have a child, the number of children, or the timing of children, but we find important effects in terms of children's outcomes. These sort of intergenerational returns accrue both to men and women to a very similar degree. That is, if a man or a woman is admitted to a more elite institution,
04:44
the children are performing substantially better in terms of mandatory standardized tests many years later, which with important implications for these children's opportunities in life. In terms of mechanisms behind the marriage market returns, we find evidence that universities act as meeting places, so that contributes,
05:05
but there must be an important role also in terms of individuals getting more attractive if they're admitted to an elite institution and or their social network being very different, which affects also their marriage outcomes.
05:21
In terms of the intergenerational effects, we find again interesting differences between men and women, so while overall the intergenerational returns are the same for men and women, the channels are different. For men, the key channel seems to be resources, so being admitted to a more elite institution
05:41
increases the investment that these men do into their children, which appears to be behind this intergenerational effect. For women, we don't find the same effect in terms of investment, but we have shown in the marriage market section that they have a substantially higher quality husband, which is likely to be behind the intergenerational effect.
06:08
From an academic point of view, our findings help to explain or shed light on an important puzzle, the so-called college enrollment puzzle that people have been talking about for a while now.
06:23
In the past, women were underrepresented in universities. By now, women have not only caught up, but they have actually overtaken men in terms of their college attendance rates. That's surprising given the fact that female labor force participation is still quite a bit lower
06:42
of women compared to men, both in the extensive margin, but in addition in the intensive margin, because part-time work is still very prevalent. And so that means that it's hard to argue that labor market returns can explain why women would attend college to a greater extent.
07:03
Now our findings directly point to an alternative or more convincing mechanism, and that is that university attendance has important marriage market returns that are particularly relevant for women. And so that might explain why by now actually women are attending universities to a greater extent.
07:23
Generally, one important return for society is that individuals attending university or attending elite universities have substantially higher labor market earnings and therefore pay higher taxes. If, on the other hand, the big part of the return is actually marriage market return,
07:41
so women attending these institutions are not going into the labor market to a much greater extent or do not have higher earning jobs, but it's mostly a tool to find a higher quality spouse, this sort of return to the society in terms of taxes at least is not there. Raising the question again about should we subsidize higher education,
08:06
should we subsidize elite institutions in particular, to what extent? So we need to know what are the effects on society in this respect.
08:20
We show that elite education affects who is matching with whom. It's obvious that the degree of assortative mating has critical implications for inequality across households, for social stratification, but also for the mobility or immobility of our society.
08:40
Our paper also shows that one way in which individuals transmit their human capital and their social status to the next generation is via this vehicle of elite education. This raises a number of important questions to investigate this link a lot more
09:01
between elite education systems and societal outcomes via the marriage market. That's, I think, a very relevant topic for the future, both in terms of academic research but also in the policy debate, because the fact that education policy can have these very long-running, far-reaching consequences on society
09:23
via the marriage market has largely been neglected.