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Determinants of College Completion: School Quality or Student Ability?
Abstract
We investigate whether the "match" between student ability and college quality is an important determinant of college graduation rates. We jointly estimate a multinomial probit model of college attendance decisions in which the alternatives are no college and attendance at college in four quality categories, and a binomial probit model of subsequent graduation decisions. By allowing the error terms to be correlated across alternatives and time periods, we identify the effects of observed factors net of their correlation with unobservables. We find that students of all ability levels have higher chances of graduating if the quality level of their college "matches" their observed skill level.
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Cited by
How robust is the evidence on the effects of college quality? Evidence from matching
Black, D. A., & Smith, J. A. (2004) · Journal of Econometrics · doi:10.1016/j.jeconom.2003.10.006 · Cited by 673
The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries
Cullen, J. B., Jacob, B. A., & Levitt, S. (2006) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00702.x · Cited by 461
Stocke, V. (2007) · European Sociological Review · doi:10.1093/esr/jcm014 · Cited by 326
Goldrick-Rab, S., Kelchen, R., Harris, D. N., & Benson, J. (2016) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/685442 · Cited by 299
Bound, J., Lovenheim, M. F., & Turner, S. (2010) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.2.3.129 · Cited by 213
Metadata
- Authors
- Light, A., & Strayer, W.
- Venue
- The Journal of Human Resources
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 2000
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 299
- ISSN
- 0022-166X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1534306777
- Cited by
- 299
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 17.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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