Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Transitions into and out of College: The Role of High Schools, Majors, and Money

(Education)

This panel includes four papers displaying a range of methodologies and diverse set of perspectives that connect pre- and post-college experiences with college choices and contexts. Taken together, these papers help inform policy efforts intended to encourage students' successful transitions into and out of college. The first two papers situate themselves in the growing research literature examining one of the most important decisions a student can make during the course of her college career – major choice. The major a student selects translates directly into the types of skills and knowledge he or she will obtain during college, and it can influence the type of career chosen after postsecondary education ends. Rodney Andrews (UT Dallas), Scott Imberman (Michigan State), and Michael Lovenheim (Cornell) use detailed administrative data from Texas and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of students’ college major choices on their postsecondary attainment and labor market outcomes. These authors find earnings premia for technical fields, and also that the premia for these fields are generally larger in flagship institutions than other four-year institutions. Rajeev Darolia (University of Missouri) and Cory Koedel (University of Missouri) also use detailed administrative data, in this case from Missouri, to examine students’ initial college and major placements in the statewide university system. These authors focus on the explanatory power of high schools over students’ sorting into university-by-major cells, and show that high schools are important predictors of the rigor of students’ initial cells conditional on students’ own pre-entry academic preparation. Findings confirm and extend previous evidence on differences in systematic sorting patterns of students from high- and low-SES high schools. Angela Boatman (Vanderbilt University) also examines the role of high schools, by studying the extent to which tracking in high school impacts remedial need in college, and the extent to which this influences subsequent college outcomes, such as degree completion. She uses a matching model and an instrumental-variable approach with a nationally representative sample of students to find an overall negative relationship between completing higher-level math and English courses during high school and the probability of needing remediation in these subjects in college. However, these results differ dramatically by student subgroup, particularly for English-language learners, where high school course-taking is not predictive of success in remedial or college-level courses in college. Rajashri Chakrabarti (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) and Joydeep Roy (Columbia University and NYC Independent Budget Office) connect a popular policy to increase in-state college attendance, state merit aid programs, to pre-college educational contexts in the state. These authors use the adoption of merit aid programs as a natural experiment and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to find evidence that merit aid programs led to a perceptible decline in K-12 state funding and a corresponding increase in K-12 local funding. Further, they find evidence school districts may have chosen to divert more resources to instruction with the introduction of state merit aid.