In the fall of 2004, Benedict College - a Historically Black College in Columbia, SC - began enforcing a new grading policy called Success Equals Effort (SE2). Under this policy, students taking freshman and sophomore level courses were assigned grades that explicitly rewarded not only content...

Rather than estimating the returns to obtaining a college degree, this paper treats the college education decision as an uncertain investment involving varying likelihoods of successful graduation. We predict earnings conditional on both graduating and not graduating from both selective and...