The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a fifty year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non-college bound students. We study the impact of these two trends on the...

This paper estimates the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. Motivated by the fact that nearly half of all college students fail to earn a bachelor’s degree, we study a model of risky college completion. The central idea is that students drop out of college mainly because...