1/n Wondering how the enrollment effects of the SFFA affirmative action ban compare to past years' bans?
Here's a new policy brief on how AA bans affects Black and Hispanic enrollment at selective universities, in the first year and years later.
**New paper** Over the past 20 years (but not before!), Black and Hispanic college graduates have been steadily earning degrees in relatively lower-paying majors.
The main culprit? An increasingly-common public university policy.
A thread.
#EconTwitter
#EconTwitter
Looking for a memorable way to explain regression discontinuity designs to your students? Show them the causal wage return to majoring in economics! Today's lead article in AEJ Applied:
Everyone should listen to the end of Claudia Goldin's interview with Orley Ashenfelter, in which she discusses her experience as a woman in economics. The whole interview is as wonderful as everything
@PikaGoldin
does, but start at 32:45:
Professional update!
Super-excited to share that I will be joining
@PrincetonEcon
as an assistant professor of economics in the Industrial Relations Section this summer.
A personal update: I've just accepted an assistant professorship at
@YaleSOM
Economics, to begin in 2022 after a postdoc at
@OppInsights
.
I owe thanks to many, especially my advisors at
@berkeleyecon
, and am tremendously excited to begin this next chapter. More work coming soon!
My letter to the
@TheAtlantic
editor on important factual inaccuracies in
@CaitlinPacific
's July 22 article about standardized tests and college admissions. For more detail, see
New data visualization: Ever wonder how lifetime wages and employment differ for selective college graduates with different demographics, majors, or even which courses they took?
These longitudinal student dashboards provide answers. A
#EconTwitter
thread
New (job market) paper: Quasi-experimental and structural analysis of novel administrative data shows that broadening public university access for lower-testing students can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses. A thread.
#EconTwitter
Now published: Looking for a great way to explain regression discontinuity designs to undergrads? Show them the causal wage return to majoring in economics! A short thread.
#EconTwitter
Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Will Studying Economics Make You Rich? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Returns to College Major" by Zachary Bleemer and Aashish Mehta.
--JOB POSTING--
I am hiring 3 new
@econ_ra
research specialists to join my
@Princeton
lab in Summer 2024 for an expected term of 2 years. They will participate in every stage of an applied micro research agenda focusing on economic mobility.
Apply here:
New paper: Banning affirmative action causes Black and Hispanic youths to have lower overall and STEM degree attainment and to earn persistently lower wages into their mid-30s. A thread. Three-page summary ; Full paper
#EconTwitter
I wrote a book!
#EconTwitter
🧵
Our goal was to translate frontier economics research into a book for parents and students to help answer three questions:
Should you go to college?
Where should you go to college?
What should you study in college?
---JOB POSTING---
I am hiring one Tobin Center / Economics Pre-Doctoral Fellow to begin Summer 2022 for an expected term of two years. The fellow will participate in every stage of an applied micro research agenda focusing on economic mobility. Info here:
I'm going to write an occasional column for
@washingtonpost
that summarizes recent trends in the economics of education. My first column is about a suite of recent studies on the potential benefits of grade inflation.
Bottom line: GPA-based major restriction policies exacerbate educational equity gaps between high- and low-SES families, with negative implications for efficiency, economic mobility, and the ethnicity wage gap. Here's the full paper: 16/n
Many people like to think of college majors as a free CHOICE made by students. We did too! But it turns out that many public universities increasingly restrict access to popular majors using GPA restrictions and competitive applications. 5/n
---JOB POSTING---
I am hiring another Tobin Center / Economics Pre-Doctoral Fellow to begin July 2022 for an expected two year term. The fellow will work with me and the
@OppInsights
team on projects related to economic mobility and higher education. Info:
---JOB POSTING---
I am hiring one new Predoctoral Fellow to join my lab in Summer 2023 for an expected term of two years. The
@econ_ra
will participate in every stage of an applied micro research agenda focusing on economic mobility.
Info here:
***New paper*** How do affirmative action's most common race-neutral alternatives comparatively reshape universities' enrollment of underrepresented minority (URM) and lower-income students?
Here's a thread of new evidence from California.
#EconTwitter
Here's a thread summarizing what happened after California banned affirmative action in 1998, including the long-run labor market effects of the ban.
The peer-reviewed study is here:
New paper: Banning affirmative action causes Black and Hispanic youths to have lower overall and STEM degree attainment and to earn persistently lower wages into their mid-30s. A thread. Three-page summary ; Full paper
#EconTwitter
Very glad that
@Harvard
and
@Yale
aren't money-grabbing with low-paying Masters degrees; it's a disgrace at many other private universities. Great reporting by
@melissakorn
@WSJ
.
BONUS: Think that major restrictions may be in students' best interest, keeping them out of fields they're unprepared for?
Our forthcoming paper in AEJ: Applied shows otherwise: RD evidence shows massive long-run costs to being booted out. 14/n
Important evidence from Texas that the economic value of enrolling at a more-selective university appears to be relatively larger for students with less pre-college academic opportunity.
Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Winners and Losers? The Effect of Gaining and Losing Access to Selective Colleges on Education and Labor Market Outcomes" by Sandra E. Black, Jeffrey T. Denning, and Jesse Rothstein.
There's good reason to expect a causal relationship: URM students earn lower average grades in first-year courses. Many were admitted for their academic promise despite having had more limited academic opportunity. They could catch up, but often don't get the chance. 8/n
I sent this information to both letters and corrections
@TheAtlantic
over 48 hours ago, but there has not yet been a public response. The article is here:
"New" paper with
@NYFedResearch
coauthors published in JUE six years after the first draft: What happens to students' education, debt, and future housing decisions when states raise public university tuition?
Underrepresented minority (URM) college graduates have long earned lower-paying majors than their non-URM peers, but the gap has been growing for the past 20 years.
Today, URM graduates earn degrees with lower average wages by almost 3%. 2/n
In other words, GPA restrictions boot out students with lower academic preparation. Even targeted major restrictions actually sort students based on ABSOLUTE, not comparative, academic advantage. 11/n
We decompose that widening gap and find that 2/3 can be explained by increased stratification WITHIN universities. URM students' shift toward for-profits matters, but not as much as growing stratification at the schools where they were already enrolling. 3/n
For example, if you want to be an economics major at
@UF
or
@UCBerkeley
, you need to earn a B average in your introductory economics courses. If you don't, you'll have to study something else instead. 6/n
Junior applied microeconomists: Come hang out in Princeton for a few days in April and share your work!
Submit a paper or extended abstract by December 20 to nlse_conference
@princeton
.edu
@econ_conf
The Northeast Labor Symposium for Early Career Economists (NLS-E)—organized this year by
@EmilioBorghesan
,
@dvergarad
, & Garima Sharma—brings together researchers to discuss cutting edge work on labor markets.
How to submit a paper:
@mattyglesias
This is wrong. In 2018, 168 students were admitted to Merced through the mechanism she is describing (it is not a pathway to any other campus). This covers a lot of issues with the STTF report. See my part for a description of how UC admissions works.
A staggered difference-in-difference design around 29 major restrictions' implementation shows that GPA restrictions cause an immediate 3 percentage point (20 percent) decline in URM attainment.
[Econometric note: Sun/Abraham estimates look the same] 10/n
Majors with GPA restrictions tend to have fewer URM students, even compared to those same majors at other schools without restrictions. But do major restrictions have a differential CAUSAL effect on URM students? 7/n
@mattyglesias
Don't mean to throw cold water on my own study, but people should read the second half, too. Big benefits for disadvantaged students and net efficiency gains, but very few kids were actually impacted (low-inc. enrollment increased <2%). Top percent policies may be small potatoes.
The paper has a bunch of other findings as well, including major restrictions' effects on the gender gap in major premiums and their disaggregated effects on Asian, Black, and Hispanic students. 15/n
We then introduce a methodological innovation -- using student major INTENTIONS (predicted using pre-policy data) as the second difference in a diff-in-diff -- to show that restrictions differentially push URM students into lower-paying majors. 12/n
@JohnHolbein1
Top percent policies work because of high school stratification: almost 90% of participants came from below-average schools, where even top students are mostly lower-income and/or underrepresented minorities. ELC made lemonade out of K-12 inequality's lemons. Thanks for sharing!
A lot of people are focused on admission to elite universities, but access to lucrative college majors may be more relevant for socioeconomic mobility.
Our new
@BrookingsInst
policy brief documents the disparate impacts of major restriction policies:
New (job market) paper: Quasi-experimental and structural analysis of novel administrative data shows that broadening public university access for lower-testing students can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses. A thread.
#EconTwitter
In sum, the paper shows that university admissions policies that target high-GPA low-SAT applicants can simultaneously promote economic mobility (through broader university access) and increase universities' economic value-added.
We study the effects of major restrictions by constructing a new detailed database that covers the 900,000 students who enrolled at four public research universities between 1975 and 2018. 9/n
Finally, we use our estimates to simulate how much of the URM major premium gap can be explained just by new restrictions. It does a good job until recent years, when we think older restrictions' tightening (like going from 3.0 to 3.3) played a bigger role. 13/n
Clarifying new theoretical work on potential efficiency limits of meritocracy when "merit" is judged using observable measures of prior performance like SAT or grades.
Link all of those introductory economics students to their mid-20s annual wages, and voilà: students with a 2.8 economics GPA have $8,000 higher average wages. That implies that majoring in economics caused those students to earn $22,000 more in their mid-20s.
Great thread on an interesting study of how policymakers react to new research findings.
Key finding that suggests we have work to do: "Policymakers don’t have a preference between observational studies and [quasi-]experimental studies."
New working paper: “Evidence-Based Decisions and Education Policymakers”
In a series of experiments, I study how education policymakers in the U.S. use research evidence to inform their decisions.
A summary 🧵 [1/N]
@Steve_Sailer
I suggest reading the thread. It turns out that allowing lower-GPA students (by which I mean B/B- students, not failing students) to study lucrative quantitative majors leads them to high-wage jobs, whereas booting them to less-lucrative majors doesn't.
BONUS: Think that major restrictions may be in students' best interest, keeping them out of fields they're unprepared for?
Our forthcoming paper in AEJ: Applied shows otherwise: RD evidence shows massive long-run costs to being booted out. 14/n
I've had a wonderful year at
@YaleSOM
, and am especially grateful to
@KerwinKCharles
and Seth Zimmerman, along with the whole economics family at SOM and in
@YaleEconomics
, for the opportunity to spend time in an amazing group.
This study complements my work on affirmative action and a recent paper on Texas Top Ten by
@Econ_Sandy
,
@JeffDenning
, and
@rothstein_jesse
: quasi-experimental studies of the medium-run effects of access-oriented U.S. admission policies evince BIG economic mobility potential.
Why do UCSC economics majors earn more? Educational outcomes like grades and completion don't explain it. But econ majors become much more likely to WANT to go into business/finance careers, and then they're more likely to do so. Industry explains about half of the wage effect.
First, I investigate student outcomes. Despite ELC participants' disadvantages, more-selective enrollment caused large increases in their degree attainment and earnings (ages 25-27), with annual wages rising by about $20,000 relative to enrolling at less-selective colleges.
Many more results in the paper. In sum, this study employs a quasi-experimental research design and novel administrative data to provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action substantively exacerbates socioeconomic inequities. 13/
In 2008-2012, UC Santa Cruz limited access to its economics major to students who earned at least a 2.8 GPA in their first two economics courses. Compliance was imperfect, but having a 2.8 GPA made students much more likely to declare the economics major.
P.S. The wage return to studying economics is Equal Opportunity! Majors earn $22,000 more whether they're male or female, and underrepresented minority students earn the same return as their non-URM peers. And that's just in their mid-20s; if anything, the return grows with age.
The findings also present a new challenge to using the SAT. Many recent books argue that tests are unfair and/or wasteful. This study suggests that tests are inefficient; they do not identify the students who would most benefit from selective universities.
@DSMarkovits
@paultough
Have questions about the short- and long-run effects of race-based affirmative action in college admissions? My study of California's 1998 affirmative action ban probably answers many of them. Feel free to ask further questions as replies below!
At
@UCRiverside
and other schools, STEM students who took more
#Humanities
courses – and who took courses in a wider variety of departments – tended to have lower wages in their first job but higher lifetime wages.
Since the 1960s, selective public universities have admitted students mostly using the SAT and other measures of academic preparedness, on the theory that highly prepared students can best take advantage of their rigorous coursework. But is that true? Evidence is non-existent.
These findings are inconsistent with the university "Mismatch Hypothesis". A series of online appendices replicate and discuss the limitations of the few prior studies suggesting that Prop 209 harmed URM youths, ultimately reconciling their analysis with my baseline findings. 12/
In fact, these returns are substantially larger than the AVERAGE value-added of UC enrollment, as estimated using a fixed-effect value-added model across universities à la
@OppInsights
.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. First interviews will be scheduled at the beginning of October.
International applicants are welcome!
Complementary regression discontinuity and institutional value-added analyses suggest that affirmative action's net wage benefits for URM applicants substantially exceed its (potentially small) net costs for on-the-margin white and Asian applicants. 11/
Here's a thread summarizing the paper's other findings. Shout-out to
@OppInsights
, David Card,
@steph_r_owen
, and others who have already used these graphs in the classroom (or on exams!!).
In 2008-2012, UC Santa Cruz limited access to its economics major to students who earned at least a 2.8 GPA in their first two economics courses. Compliance was imperfect, but having a 2.8 GPA made students much more likely to declare the economics major.
Enrolling at less-selective UC campuses did not improve URM UC students' performance or persistence in STEM course sequences. URM students' relatively lower STEM grades are explained by limited high school opportunities and preparedness, not affirmative action. 10/
Prop 209 also deterred thousands of qualified URM students from applying to any UC campus, likely exacerbating these estimated effects. (However, sensitivity analyses show that substantial selection bias is very unlikely after conditioning on applicants' academic preparedness) 9/
Turns out that you'd almost hit the nail on the head! Whether you use UCSC, state, or national wage averages, you'd slightly UNDERshoot the estimated return to majoring in economics. This appears to be because lower-GPA students have slightly above-average returns to the major.
This study answers three questions. First, which students are targeted by affirmative action, and to what degree does affirmative action impact where those students go to college? 1/
New data are key to this study. I analyze a newly-constructed highly-detailed longitudinal database linking all 1994-2002 University of California applicants to their college enrollment, course performance, major choice, degree attainment, and wages into their mid-30s. 5/
Takeaway from a great thread: At a small elite private university with pervasive elite social clubs (Harvard), "exposure to high-status peers helps students achieve social success in college, but the overall effects are driven entirely by large gains for private feeder students."
Since the 1960s, the share of Humanities courses taught at UC has steadily fallen by half, even at
@UCSC
.
#STEM
fields have swiftly expanded in recent years.
Affirmative action provided very large admissions advantages to UC's 10,000 annual underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants. Ending affirmative action caused them to cascade into lower-quality universities. URM enrollment at Berkeley/UCLA and across UC plummeted. 6/
But second, my and others' work has shown that access-oriented admissions policies tend to be efficiency-enhancing. Lower-testing students tend to get more out of selective universities than their higher-testing peers.
New (job market) paper: Quasi-experimental and structural analysis of novel administrative data shows that broadening public university access for lower-testing students can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses. A thread.
#EconTwitter
@Noah_McKBraun
Interesting question. Here's the closest thing we have: before restrictions, URM students' grades in upper-div courses are relatively worse than non-URM students'. After the restriction, the gap closes. So restrictions do seem to filter out URM students who would get lower grades
@m_urquiola
@RDMetcalfe
@mikekofoed
@Econ_4_Everyone
Three points:
(1) Corroborating evidence that HS econ isn't doing much good:
(2) Econ BA is super-valuable, but I doubt that's true for PhD:
(3) Access to econ BAs is low & falling for low-SES students:
Under
#affirmativeaction
, Black and Hispanic students were twice as likely to be admitted to Berkeley/UCLA as white and Asian students with similar SATs and grades.
That advantage fell to 40% in 1998, and the policies implemented since then haven't moved the needle so much.
Thanks to
@BerkeleyCSHE
and
@NAEduc
for supporting this research, to
@MD4SG
for its 'Best Paper Award' earlier this year, and to you for reading! Once again, you can read the full paper here:
My latest in
@Forbes
: A new study shows that colleges are restricting enrollment in five of the highest-paying majors.
Since the value of college depends on your major, this is deeply concerning.
Quick 🧵:
Computer science is one of the highest-wage majors, but also the major with the highest mid-career job turnover rate. At
@UCIrvine
, for example, mid-career
#CompSci
majors are 60 percent more likely to have switched jobs in the past 5 years than the average grad.
I answer these questions by studying the ramifications of Proposition 209, which banned race-based affirmative action at California public universities in 1998. I use a difference-in-difference research design to compare university applicant outcomes before and after Prop 209. 4/
URM UC applicants' undergraduate and graduate degree attainment – from UC or any other college or university – declined overall and in STEM fields, especially among applicants with lower "Academic Indices" (AI), a weighted average of SAT scores and high school grades. 7/
@Steve_Sailer
@drkarenhj
👍 Not my first-choice solution, but I'll take it! Purdue does this, and there are many others; e.g. "data science" for comp sci and "environmental econ" for econ at Bkly. I have some unpublished analysis showing these work for human capital: all the wage gain without the signal.
Application materials go to bleemer.research.lab
@gmail
.com.
The Fellow will be part of the Tobin Center fellows program at Yale University, which has a great pre-doc community and an excellent placement record:
@econ_ra
The new study starts by taking a look at admission and enrollment at the University of California since the 1990s.
While URM enrollment seems to has "recovered" at Berkeley and UCLA since AA was banned, the recovery can be wholly explained by demographic trends in California.