While there is evidence of a substantial and rising labor market premium associated with college attendance, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different quality and across time. Previous research which has estimated the return to college quality has not taken...

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a...

Although a substantial and rising labor market premium is associated with college attendance in general, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different types and across time. In this paper we explicitly model high school students' choice of college type...

The distribution of college majors changed markedly between the 1970s and 1980s as fewer students completed degrees in low-skill fields such as education and letters and more graduated in high-skill fields such as engineering and business. This shift was most dramatic for females, who previously...

A growing body of empirical evidence shows teacher quality to be the most important schooling factor predicting students' learning gains. Unfortunately, US public schools face difficulties attracting the best and brightest college graduates. Over the last several decades there has been a notable...

The college wage premium for new labor market entrants rose sharply during the 1980s. We ask how much of this change arose from changes in the skill level of the typical college graduate. We find that skills attained prior to college, as measured by standardized test scores and high school...