Imagine a young person who looks, on paper, highly unlikely to go to college. His high-school class rank was poor. His parents have low incomes and never studied beyond high school. None of his friends are pursuing higher education. If this person does manage to enroll in college despite all those obstacles, is he wasting his time and money?
Maybe not—assuming that he actually graduates. A paper that will be published on Thursday in the American Sociological Review suggests that the students who are least likely to attend college gain the strongest economic benefits from holding a college degree. The college wage premium—the average wage differential between high-school and college graduates—appears to be strongest for people who come from socioeconomic groups that are least likely to attend college in the first place, the paper says.
“The college graduates from the against-the-odds stratum seem to have the best results, relative to their peers,” says Jennie E. Brand, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Ms. Brand wrote the paper with Yu Xie, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Tracking Wages Over Decades
Ms. Brand and Mr. Xie analyzed data from two longitudinal surveys: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which interviewed people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 and followed them for many years thereafter, and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked people who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1957.
Though those data might seem old, Ms. Brand says they provided the best way to analyze wages and salaries over life’s course; each study followed the participants past the age of 40. And those studies also offered an unusually rich set of data about, for example, whether the participants were encouraged by their parents to attend college.
In almost all of the analyses Ms. Brand and Mr. Xie carried out, the results were the same: The college wage premium was largest for the students who (on paper) had the lowest propensity to attend college, and smallest for those students who were most likely to attend.
Among participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, men with the lowest college-going propensities earned 30 percent more after finishing college than did their peers (that is, similarly disadvantaged men who stopped their education after high school) from the ages of 29 to 32. By contrast, men with the highest college-going propensities earned wages that were only 10 percent higher than those of their peers (that is, similarly privileged men who never attended college) at those ages. Among the women in that study, the pattern was similar: College graduates with the lowest propensity scores earned 40 percent more from the ages of 29 to 32 than did their noncollege peers, but those with the highest propensities earned only 25 percent more than did their noncollege peers during those years of their lives.
What to make of those results? Does this paper shed any light on recent debates about whether too many students are going to college?
The study does not offer any simple answers to policy questions, Ms. Brand says. There is a real chance, she says, that expanding the student population would have strong benefits for the newly enrolled students. But she and Mr. Xie cannot rule out the possibility that the “low propensity” students in their analysis had certain unmeasurable traits that explain their success. Maybe they were extraordinarily self-disciplined people. Maybe, precisely because of their generally disadvantaged backgrounds, they were unusually motivated to seek out high-paying jobs after graduation.
“But I don’t want to make too much of those caveats,” Ms. Brand continues. “There’s also the flip side. Among the people with the highest propensity to attend college, there were some who never graduated. And they might have had some unusual traits, too—maybe negative traits. And yet their wages are not that much lower than the wages of their peers who finished college.”
Factors Behind Choosing College
The question that drives Ms. Brand and Mr. Xie is how students find their way to college in the United States. Some scholars have put forward a rational-choice model in which 18-year-olds coolly weigh their prospects for succeeding in college and earning higher incomes, and then enroll in college (or not) according to that calculation.
But Ms. Brand and Ms. Xie believe that such models are too crude. If it were true, they say, then the students most likely to increase their earning power would also be the most likely to attend college. But their analyses show the opposite.
Accurate models of college decision-making must incorporate sociological factors, Ms. Brand and Mr. Xie say. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds might not make it beyond high school in part because they lack contact with counselors or college-going friends who can tell them about how to apply. They might have parents who discourage college or who overestimate the costs of attending. They might have family obligations that make it difficult to leave home. None of those social elements, the authors say, are adequately captured in the traditional rational-choice models.
“I teach sociology of education,” Ms. Brand says. “And I sometimes ask my students about what factors motivated them to go to college. And there is a real spread. Some who come from more-advantaged backgrounds say, ‘Of course I was going to go to college. It wasn’t even a question.’ But some from the more disadvantaged backgrounds really do think that they have to make accounts to their families and give back to their communities. They’re struggling financially.”
In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Richard K. Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, calls the paper “very interesting and generally well done.” But he offers a few concerns.
“The authors fail to mention the fact that for most, higher education is both a consumption and an investment purchase,” Mr. Vedder writes. “Perhaps all the authors are saying, in effect, is that for those who actually attend college (mostly middle-class kids), college is to a considerable extent an exercise in socialization and recreation, whereas for nonattendees from less-advantaged backgrounds, higher education is considered mostly an investment good. This is not inconsistent with economists’ conceptualization of individuals trying to maximize their satisfaction in life.”
It also would have been better, Mr. Vedder suggests, for the scholars to have considered variations in the quality of colleges attended by students of different college-going propensities.
Ms. Brand concedes that point. “Treating college as a dichotomous event is clearly a simplification,” she says. “People from different college-going strata are likely to attend colleges of varying quality. If anything, though, that would suggest that we are conservative in our conclusion.”
