Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach
A growing body of social science research has investigated whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous — in particular, whether socioeconomically disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attending and completing college relative to their more advantaged peers. Scholars, howe...
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crcenteros:10.31235/osf.io/hr3n6 2023-11-12T04:16:27+01:00 Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach Zhou, Xiang 2021 http://dx.doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hr3n6 unknown Center for Open Science https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode posted-content 2021 crcenteros https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hr3n6 2023-10-26T21:42:53Z A growing body of social science research has investigated whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous — in particular, whether socioeconomically disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attending and completing college relative to their more advantaged peers. Scholars, however, have employed different analytical strategies and reported mixed findings. To shed light on this literature, I propose a sequential approach to conceptualizing, evaluating, and unpacking the causal effects of college on earnings. By decomposing the total effect of attending a four-year college into several direct and indirect components, this approach not only clarifies the mechanisms through which college attendance boosts earnings, but illuminates the ways in which the postsecondary system may be both an equalizer and a disequalizer. The total effect of college attendance, its direct and indirect components, and their heterogeneity by socioeconomic background are all identified under the assumption of sequential ignorability. I introduce a debiased machine learning (DML) method for estimating all quantities of interest, along with a set of bias formulas for sensitivity analysis. I illustrate the proposed framework and methodology using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Other/Unknown Material DML COS Center for Open Science (via Crossref) |
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A growing body of social science research has investigated whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous — in particular, whether socioeconomically disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attending and completing college relative to their more advantaged peers. Scholars, however, have employed different analytical strategies and reported mixed findings. To shed light on this literature, I propose a sequential approach to conceptualizing, evaluating, and unpacking the causal effects of college on earnings. By decomposing the total effect of attending a four-year college into several direct and indirect components, this approach not only clarifies the mechanisms through which college attendance boosts earnings, but illuminates the ways in which the postsecondary system may be both an equalizer and a disequalizer. The total effect of college attendance, its direct and indirect components, and their heterogeneity by socioeconomic background are all identified under the assumption of sequential ignorability. I introduce a debiased machine learning (DML) method for estimating all quantities of interest, along with a set of bias formulas for sensitivity analysis. I illustrate the proposed framework and methodology using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. |
format |
Other/Unknown Material |
author |
Zhou, Xiang |
spellingShingle |
Zhou, Xiang Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
author_facet |
Zhou, Xiang |
author_sort |
Zhou, Xiang |
title |
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
title_short |
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
title_full |
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
title_fullStr |
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
title_full_unstemmed |
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach |
title_sort |
attendance, completion, and heterogeneous returns to college: a causal mediation approach |
publisher |
Center for Open Science |
publishDate |
2021 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hr3n6 |
genre |
DML |
genre_facet |
DML |
op_rights |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hr3n6 |
_version_ |
1782333539177463808 |