College Access and Attendance Patterns: A Long-Run View

Lutz Hendricks (), Christopher Herrington and Todd Schoellman

No 10, Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We harmonize the results of 42 different data sets and studies dating back to the early 20th century to construct a time series of college attendance patterns for the United States. We find an important reversal around the time of World War II: before that time, family characteristics such as income were the better predictor of college attendance; afterwards, academic ability was the better predictor. We construct a model of college choice that can explain this reversal. The model's central mechanism is an exogenous rise in the demand for college that leads better colleges to become oversubscribed. These colleges institute selective admissions and raise their quality relative to the remaining colleges, as in Hoxby (2009). Rising quality at better colleges attracts high-ability students, while falling quality at the remaining colleges dissuades low-ability students, generating the reversal.

Keywords: College access; Intergenerational mobility; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 I24 N32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 pages
Date: 2018-07-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp10.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp10.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp10.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmoi:0010

DOI: 10.21034/iwp.10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().