No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Employment and salaries of university graduates: impact evaluation of a financial aid programme by means of propensity score matching
Abstract
Introduction / Objective: Educational funding in Venezuela is limited, especially in private higher education institutions, due to existing budget constraints. Despite these limitations, some grant programmes manage to serve a significant proportion of students. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact of a financial aid programme at a Latin American university by analysing the probability of employment and remuneration at three key points in time: during the degree programme, upon graduation, and three years after graduation. Methodology: A sample of graduates from various programmes was used, and information about their career paths was collected by means of a follow-up survey. The analysis was conducted using propensity score matching through the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) estimator, employing both parametric and non-parametric methods. Results: The results indicate an inverse relationship between the financial aid received and the salary earned during the evaluation periods, alongside a positive relationship with the probability of being employed. However, none of the estimated coefficients were significant, whether for the nearest neighbour, the 5 or 10 nearest neighbours, the Kernel estimation, or the local linear estimation, taking into account the common support and the 20% trimming. Conclusions: It cannot be concluded that the grant received during the degree programme significantly improves employment and remuneration outcomes. This suggests the need for a comprehensive programme that includes support in job placement processes in order to enhance these outcomes.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of China’s recent education policy on the labor market performance (i.e., employability and wages) of both general and vocational education graduates. The policy requires 50% of junior high school graduates to pursue secondary vocational education. The policy received public complaints because, in many parts of the world, students are free to decide on their future education. This paper measures the impacts of education type on labor market performance for both general and vocational education graduates, seeking to uncover the differing perspectives between Chinese authorities and the public. The study utilizes secondary survey data from the Chinese Social Survey 2021 (CSS2021) and employs the Mincer earnings function to analyze several main factors, such as years of education (yoe), years of work (yow), education type (et), interaction between edt and yoe and yow, and gender. The results highlight the significant role of education in enhancing both employability and wages—indicating that increased years of education positively correlate with improved employment prospects and higher wages. Regarding the relationship between wages and gender across both education types, males generally receive higher wages, while the dynamics in the relationship between employment and gender differ, with females exhibiting a greater likelihood of employment. The impact of education type on employability is slightly complicated. Employers do not prefer employing general education graduates. However, when we combined education type with years of experience, the findings revealed a preference among employers for hiring general education graduates with extensive work experience. This study has policy implications for the Chinese government in fostering the balanced development of vocational and general education, benefiting both individuals and society.
Low-income students’ preferences for higher education might depend on the uncertainty of financial aid. Using a time discontinuity design, this paper exploits the unanticipated cancellation of a nationwide Colombian merit and need-based scholarship, called Ser Pilo Paga, to study its consequences on students’ preferences for higher education. Preferences are measured using a discrete choice experiment administrated to 949 low-income high school students in 2018. The findings reveal that the scholarship’s cancellation reduced higher education ambitions among low-income students due to the decreased interest in both financial aid and high-quality universities. The effects were particularly concentrated on income-eligible individuals who were more likely to obtain the scholarship, as their choices for financial aid and high-quality institutions declined by 15 to 50% of the baseline preference.
La presente investigación evaluó el impacto del Curso de Iniciación Universitaria (CIU) de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, sede Montalbán, Caracas, Venezuela, en las cortes de ingreso 2008 a 2011, bajo la hipótesis de un mejor resultado académico para los tratados con el programa. La investigación se basó en un diseño cuasiexperimental en el que fue posible definir a partir de un índice de asignación quién se beneficia o no del tratamiento, y este criterio tiene un valor único en función de la carrera y no se ve afectado por otros criterios de la institución o el solicitante. En este tipo de diseño, se usa un índice para ordenar las unidades de análisis y un cierto valor de ese índice como criterio de selección de los grupos, de modo que los individuos elegidos para el tratamiento no puedan ser elegidos para no ser tratados. Empleando el diseño de regresiones discontinuas agudas, tanto para la metodología paramétrica y no paramétrica el CIU reduce, al menos localmente, la deserción de escuela y la de la institución entre un 9% y un 11% respectivamente, aunque no así la prosecución, sobre la cual no existe evidencia empírica que indique un mejor desempeño para los estudiantes tratados.
Students with a foster care background experience significant disparity in enrollment and postsecondary completion when compared to their peers without foster care experience. A number of barriers exist that may impact college persistence and completion. Finances and inadequate financial aid are often identified as a primary concern for students with a foster care background who are attending college. Using a national sample, this study examined the relationship between receipt of financial aid and the likelihood of completing a postsecondary credential among students with a foster care background. Findings indicate that financial aid has a positive relationship with earning a postsecondary credential, however, other sources of financial support and services were not always indicative of positive outcomes. Study findings reinforce the importance of social support, postsecondary education support services, academic support services, and employment as postsecondary education promoters. Several policy and practice implications are discussed that are relevant in postsecondary education settings, and child welfare settings.
It is an important deployment of the Party Central Committee and the State Council to fully promote the employment of college graduates with higher quality, and salary is an important indicator of quality measurement. This paper takes the cross-sectional data of the employment of graduates from a financial and economic university in 2020 as the sample; whether the actual starting salary is a high salary as the dependent variable; and human capital, social capital, labor market as the explanatory variables and uses R to establish a logistic regression model to analyze the determinants of the high salary of graduates. Five machine learning methods, SVM, naive Bayes, CART, random forest, and XGBoost, are used to predict whether graduates can get a high starting salary, compare the advantages and disadvantages of various methods horizontally, optimize the parameters at the same time, and further enhance the performance of the model. Based on the employment data of graduate students in a university of finance and economics in 2020, this paper makes an empirical study. The study shows that academic qualifications, professional disciplines, employment regions, employment industries, the nature of employment units, gender, and whether they have served as student cadres have a significant impact on whether graduates can get “high salaries.” The main factors affecting the starting salary of graduates are the accumulation of human capital and social capital, but the segmentation of labor market is also the main reason affecting the starting salary of graduates. The prediction results of several models show that the integrated models have better performance than single models, and the XGBoost model is the best, which can help predict whether graduates get high salary.
La presente investigación evaluó el impacto del programa de ayudas económicas de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas, Venezuela, sobre la deserción y el egreso. Se empleó el diseño de regresiones discontinuas difusas para tratamientos múltiples con cuatro puntos de corte en la variable de asignación (índice de ayuda). Los resultados obtenidos muestran que los efectos marginales sobre los distintos tipos de deserción son significativos y presentan los signos esperados (negativo). Un aumento del 1% en el descuento de la matrícula reduce la deserción temprana en aproximadamente 1% y 0.5% la deserción tardía; mientras que eleva en 0.6% la tasa de egreso. La evidencia pareciera mostrar que se requiere introducir cambios en el programa en términos de los criterios de asignación y los montos de apoyo económico.
Previous studies suggest that a college degree is the great equalizer leveling the playing field. However, the rapidly growing educational debt of college graduates might restrict their life chances throughout adulthood, particularly for those raised in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. This study uses data from the National Survey of College Graduates to examine whether parents’ socioeconomic status is related to their children’s student loan repayment after graduation. Holding the amount borrowed for completing higher education constant, college graduates with less educated parents hold a larger amount of educational debt in adulthood compared with their counterparts with more educated parents. The association between family background and student loan repayment remains significant with the addition of controls for various covariates related to college graduates’ education, occupation, income, and other labor market outcomes. This study suggests that educational debt burdens imposed on individual college graduates limit the meritocratic power of higher education.
Due to the prevalence and important consequences of student work, the topic has seen an increased interest in the literature. However, to date the focus has been solely on measuring the effect of student employment on later labour market outcomes, relying on signalling theory to explain the observed effects. In the current study, we go beyond measuring the effect of student work and we examine for the first time what exactly is being signalled by student employment. We do this by means of a vignette experiment in which we ask 242 employers to evaluate a set of five fictitious profiles. Whereas all types of student work signal a better work attitude, a larger social network, a greater sense of responsibility, an increased motivation, and more maturity, only student employment in line with a job candidate's field of study is a signal of increased human capital and increased trainability.
Student loan debt represents an important phenomenon in the United States, as around 61% of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with a debt of over $28,100. Although studies emphasize that holding student loan debt delays the transition to adulthood in terms of marriage and home ownership, little is known about its impact on employment and this limited research offers, at best, equivocal evidence. The current study draws from Conservation of Resources theory to argue that student loan debt acts as a major financial stressor for new labor market entrants during job search. Using archival data from 1,248 graduating seniors from four geographically diverse universities in the United States collected in the context of a prospective study design, we found evidence for two countervailing mechanisms through which student loan debt may influence full-time employment upon graduation. On the one hand, college students who had student loan debt were more likely to experience financial strain, and subsequently more job search strain, which was negatively related to college seniors’ odds of securing full-time employment upon graduation. On the other hand, this financial strain was also positively related to students’ work hours while in the last semester of college, which was positively related to their odds of securing full-time employment upon graduation. Further mediation tests revealed that only the three-stage indirect effect through job search strain (i.e., student loan debt financial strain job search strain full-time employment) was statistically significant. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Little empirical literature assessing the impact of Erasmus study program on graduate career prospects exists. All too often, the empirical evidence available is either bias or indirect. Furthermore, the existing differences among study mobility participants and non-participant peers in terms of ability, socioeconomic background or field of study are often ignored, leading us to believe that the correlations observed to date cannot be considered as causal. In an attempt to obtain less biased evidence on the effect of Erasmus study mobility on career and salary prospects, a propensity score matching approach was used. As far as we are aware, no other studies involving this approach have been carried out in Spain. Our objective therefore was to contribute to the knowledge available through the analysis of two graduate surveys. The main conclusion reached was that in the medium term, Erasmus programs do in effect have a positive impact on the prospects of recent graduates, who in terms of income were able to command salaries that were 10–12 per cent higher than their counterparts. (Free access to my article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HI3ZWVTYVMFH7AUDYIFV/full?target=10.1080/03075079.2019.1582011)
Using data from two freshmen cohorts at a public research university (N = 3730), this study examines the relationship between loan aid and second-year enrollment persistence. Applying a counterfactual analytical framework that relies on propensity score (PS) weighting and matching to address selection bias associated with treatment status, the study estimates that loan aid exerts a significant negative effect on persistence for students from low-income background (i.e., Pell eligible), and those taking up high amounts of loans in order to meet total cost of attendance, including students who exhausted the available amount of subsidized loan aid. However, no significant incremental effect associated with unsubsidized loan aid, net of subsidized loan aid, could be detected. The estimated effect of loan aid on persistence controls for first-year academic experience and takes into account 26 factors related to loan selection and persistence in order to match students with loan aid to a counterfactual case in covariate adjusted regression. Comparison with results from non-matched-sample analysis suggests selection bias may mask the negative effect of loans detected with matched-sample estimation. Validity of covariates determining the loan selection process and criteria for acceptable balance in the matched data are discussed, and implications for future research are addressed.
China established a large-scale financial aid system in the late 1980s. This multilayered aid system aimed at enhancing educational and employment opportunities. However, very few studies have examined the impact of student aid on learning effort and outcome, career decisions, and early labor market performance. Using two recent Chinese college student surveys, this study found that students who received financial aid were significantly more likely to take more courses, spend more hours studying outside class, have a higher class ranking, and be less likely to fail a course. Additionally, having financial aid could promote graduate school enrollment and initial employment but had no significant impact on expected salary. Current aid programs for those who receive public financial assistance are thus beneficial in terms of educational outcome and employment perspective.
Teniendo como referentes la teoría del capital humano y la de se˜nalización, el documento analiza la influencia de variables socioeconómicas, laborales y de las características de las Instituciones de Educación Superior (IES), sobre el ingreso laboral de los graduados universitarios en Colombia, utilizando la Herramienta de Seguimiento a Graduados (2005). Se encuentra que vivir en Bogotá, ser hombre, tener padres m´as educados o haber obtenido el t´ıtulo en IES privadas o acreditadas, se relaciona positivamente con la probabilidad de devengar mayores ingresos laborales. El ´area de conocimiento, la posición ocupacional y el tipo de vinculación laboral también explican los ingresos de la población estudiada. ***************** Combining Human Capital and Signaling theories and a previously unavailable data source, this paper seeks to explain recent graduates’ labor income in Colombia. Data from a National Education Ministry survey is used given its comparative advantages on providing specific information such as field of study and features of the education institution. The main result is that some specific features as male gender, residence in Bogot´a, having parents with higher levels of education, or a degree obtained from a private institution, enhance the probability of obtaining a higher labor income. Some regularities as field of study and occupational position also explain higher wage levels.
This study explores regional differences in wage inequality in India and examine various contributory factors for increasing disparities in wages across different regions in India. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011–12 and employing RIF regression methodology, the study investigates the influence of the level of education, experience, English and computer skills, gender, age, religion, and other background characteristics on wage inequality. The findings reveal that higher education levels, experience, English, and computer skills significantly contribute to wage disparities across regions. The study highlights the importance of addressing these factors to promote greater equity and inclusivity in the labor market.
Purpose
Education system stimulates the development of human capital and provides informative signaling allowing to differentiate productivity of individuals. If education system is efficient then higher levels of education usually associated with greater returns on labor market. To evaluate the efficiency of Russian education system we aim to estimate the effect of vocational education and different levels of higher education on wages.
Design/methodology/approach
We use data on 8,764 individuals in the years 2019–2021. Our statistical approach addresses two critical issues: nonrandom selection into employment and the endogeneity of education choice. To tackle these problems, we employed Heckman’s method and its extension that is a structural model which addresses the issue of self-selection into different levels of education.
Findings
The results of the analysis suggest that there is a significant heterogeneity in the returns to different levels of education. First, higher education, in general, offers substantial wage premiums when compared to vocational education. Specifically, individuals with specialist’s and bachelor’s degrees enjoy higher wage premiums of approximately 23.59–24.04% and 16.43–16.49%, respectively, compared to those with vocational education. Furthermore, we observe a significant dis-parity in returns among the various levels of higher education. Master’s degree provides a substantial wage premium in comparison to both bachelor’s (19.79–20.96%) and specialist’s (12.64–13.41%) degrees. Moreover, specialist degree offers a 7.16–7.55% higher wage premium than bachelor’s degree.
Practical implications
We identify a hierarchical pattern in the returns associated with different levels of higher education in Russia, specifically “bachelor-specialist-master.” These findings indicate that each level of education in Russia serves as a distinct signal in the labor market, facilitating employers' ability to differentiate between workers. From a policy perspective, our results suggest the potential benefits of offering opportunities to transition from specialist’s to master’s degrees on a tuition-free basis. Such a policy may enhance access to advanced education and potentially lead to higher returns for individuals in the labor market.
Originality/value
There are many studies on returns to higher education in Russia. However, just few of them estimate the returns to different levels of higher education. Also, these studies usually do not address the issue of the endogeneity arising because of self-selection into different levels of education. Our structural econometric model allows addressing for this issue and provides consistent estimates of returns to different levels of education under the assumption that individuals with higher propensity to education obtain higher levels of education.
Student employment is on the increase in many European countries. It takes many forms, from full-time employment to various types of flexible work, which involves short-term, non-standard and informal work. Despite its relevance and complexity, the connection between higher education and concurrent employment has been only partially explored in scholarly debate. This paper investigates the differing patterns of employment for university students, focusing on the role played by parental background, educational choices (i.e. field of study and residential status) and access to benefits. The analyses apply to the Italian higher education system and are based on data collected through a survey carried out among students enrolled at the University of Bologna, which has a highly developed student grant system and a large number of away from home students. Using multinomial logistic regression, the paper shows that students native of Bologna from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and enrolled in the humanities and social sciences are more likely than their peers to be in employment. The findings on Right to Study are hence particularly important from a policy perspective, as they highlight the different roles that scholarships and tuition fee waivers play in employment choices whilst at university.
This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo‐panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market.
Using data from 27 European countries in the academic years 2005/06, 2010/11, and 2015/16, we investigate the association between student funding policies and student labour during term time – a phenomenon often seen as detrimental for higher education outcomes. Income substitution effects between entitlements to different types of financial aid and labour income can vary depending on national context, including prevailing norms with regard to students’ transition to independent adulthood. Thus, we use panel regressions with random effects for countries, controlling for relevant factors like average wages in the economy. We could not reject the null hypothesis of no relationship between student funding policy and the share of students in employment. On the other hand, generosity of student funding, in particular of its non-repayable components, was negatively, albeit weakly, associated with the average hours worked by employed students. We found this pattern to be more prevalent among older and female students, but not among students living with parents or from lower educational backgrounds. Overall, student funding policies explain little cross-country variance in student labour. This could be attributed to students’ preference to use public funding as a substitute of parental transfers or a mean for increasing their total income.
The Middle East and North Africa region struggled to meet the employment aspirations of its increasingly educated youth in the aftermath of structural reforms. This article examines the evolution of initial labor market outcomes across pre- and post-reform cohorts of school leavers by education and socioeconomic status (SES) in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. Results show that formal jobs for educated new entrants are increasingly allocated according to SES, as measured by parents’ education and father’s occupation, in Egypt and Tunisia, but not in Jordan. In Egypt and Tunisia, the quality of initial jobs deteriorated for educated new entrants, particularly among those with lower SES. This rising tide of inequality of opportunity in employment may have contributed to the Arab Spring uprisings and remains an important source of frustration for youth and their families.
The purpose of the study was to evaluate the impact of the financial aid programme aimed at discounting tuition fees at one of Venezuela’s first private universities on early and late student departure, both from the degree programme and the institution, as well as on graduation. The propensity score matching was used by calculating the average treatment effect estimator under parametric and non-parametric methodologies such as nearest neighbours, Kernel, or local linear regression. The results indicate that although there is evidence of the programme exerting a positive impact on early student departure to a greater extent (reductions between 8% and 15%), the impact tends to be considerably less when it comes to reducing late student departure (between 1% and 5%), and it had no impact on graduation.
Total U.S. student loan debt has grown substantially, raising concerns about its impacts. Previous work has suggested that indebted graduates pursue higher-wage careers. However, other trade-offs are possible in adverse economic conditions. Graduates may reduce search effort or hold multiple low-wage jobs to enable debt repayment. This article assesses student debt’s impacts on the outcomes of U.S. bachelor’s degree recipients entering the labor market during the 2008 Recession. We find that indebted students graduating into a recession face the repayment burden with wages that are no higher than average and are less or no more likely to enroll in graduate school.
Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides comprehensive support to a college population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from low-income, minority, and first-generation college households. Randomly assigned STBF awards boost bachelor’s (BA) degree completion for students targeting four-year schools by about 8 points. Degree gains are concentrated among four-year applicants who would otherwise have been unlikely to pursue a four-year program. Degree effects are mediated by award-induced increases in credits earned towards a BA in the first year of college. The extent of initial four-year college engagement explains impact differences by target campus and across covariate subgroups. The projected lifetime earnings impact of awards exceeds marginal educational spending for all of the subgroups examined in the study. Projected earnings gains exceed funder costs for urban students and for students with relatively weak academic preparation.
We replicate and extend prior work on Florida’s Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and instrumental variable results generally reject estimates as small as 1 to 2 percentage points. Across subgroups, we find that eligibility slightly reduces 6-year associate degree attainment for lower socioeconomic status students and may induce small enrollment shifts among Hispanic and White students toward 4-year colleges. Our findings of these minimal-at-best impacts contrast those of prior works, attributable in part to methodological improvements and more robust data, and further underscore the importance of study replication.
Enrolment in higher education has risen dramatically in Latin America, especially in Chile. Yet graduation and persistence rates remain low. One way to improve graduation and persistence is to use data and analytics to identify students at risk of dropout, target interventions, and evaluate interventions’ effectiveness at improving student success. We illustrate the potential of this approach using data from eight Chilean universities. Results show that data available at matriculation are only weakly predictive of persistence, while prediction improves dramatically once data on university grades become available. Some predictors of persistence are under policy control. Financial aid predicts higher persistence, and being denied a first-choice major predicts lower persistence. Student success programmes are ineffective at some universities; they are more effective at others, but when effective they often fail to target the highest risk students. Universities should use data regularly and systematically to identify high-risk students, target them with interventions, and evaluate those interventions’ effectiveness.
We estimate effects of the Pell Grant—the largest US federal grant for college students—using administrative data from Texas public colleges and a discontinuity in grant generosity for low-income students. Within four-year institutions, eligibility for additional grant aid significantly increases first-time students’ degree completion and later earnings. Our estimated impacts on earnings alone are enough to fully recoup government expenditures within 10 years, suggesting that financial aid likely pays for itself several times over. (JEL H75, I22, I23, I26, J24, J31)
We study the impact of student debt on various labor market outcomes, namely, income, hourly wages, and hours worked. Using the NLSY97 and a difference-indifference approach, we find statistically significant differences in labor market outcomes for individuals who received a student loan versus those who received no student loan. We find that the difference in post- versus pre-college income is 8-9 percent higher for individuals that received a student loan relative to individuals who received no student loan. Further, we find evidence that this higher income is due to higher work hours.
Prior research has demonstrated that financial aid can influence both college enrollments and completions, but less is known about its post-college consequences. This study is the first to link college and financial aid information to credit bureau data later in life, enabling us to examine the impacts of grant aid on homeownership, neighborhood characteristics, and credit outcomes. We use a regression-discontinuity (RD) strategy to identify causal effects of the WV PROMISE scholarship, a broad-based state merit aid program, up to 10 years after college-entry. The RD is imperfect because our sample is limited to college students and the scholarship program increased enrollment, but there is little evidence of selection on observables at the threshold. We find that scholarship recipients near the test score cutoff for eligibility are more likely to earn a graduate degree, are more likely to own a home and live in higher-income neighborhoods. Effects on annual earnings and credit outcomes are similarly positive, but imprecise. These positive effects are primarily due to substantial reductions in time to degree, rather than to reduced student debt upon graduation.
The Australian Government’s efforts to increase the proportion of Australians with university-level qualifications has placed educational aspirations at the forefront of education policy. Despite increasing numbers of young Australians enrolling in higher education, regional and rural students continue to be underrepresented in university populations. Previous research shows that levels of social capital are positively associated with educational aspirations; therefore, in this paper, we examine the associations between access to various forms of social capital and aspirations for post-school study and employment. We conduct analysis of data collected from 460 students attending government secondary schools located in and around Shepparton in regional Victoria. Of the various measures of social capital, we focus on parent-derived social capital, discussions with parents; student-derived social capital, participation in extracurricular activities and peer-derived social capital, aspirations of their friends. We explore how measures of social capital can be used to critically make sense and engage with the post-school aspirations of young people in the increasingly precarious landscape of youth employment in the twenty-first century.
We examine the long- term impacts of California's state- based financial aid by tracking educational and labor force outcomes for up to 14 years after high school graduation. We identify program impacts by exploiting variation in eligibility rules using GPA and family income cutoffs that are ex ante unknown to applicants. Aid eligibility increases undergraduate and graduate degree completion, and for some subgroups, raises longer-run annual earnings and the likelihood that young adults reside in California. These findings suggest that the net cost of financial aid programs may frequently be overstated, though our results are too imprecise to provide exact cost- benefit estimates.
This article explores non-traditional student and graduate views of the university in Ireland and Portugal as it relates to their expectations of, and experiences in, the labour market. The research is based on in-depth biographical interviews with 61 non-traditional students and graduates conducted longitudinally (85 interviews in total). The article contextualises the research in relation to the expansion of higher education internationally as well as national and EU policies aimed at supporting a ‘knowledge-based economy’. It offers an overview of the meaning of precarity. It then outlines key empirical findings from the research related to student expectations of their degree and their post-graduation experience in the labour market. In particular, it explores the phenomenon of precarity amongst graduates how this is experienced and handled in various ways. Using a critical and egalitarian lens the overall aim of the research is to widen the focus of widening participation debates and explore how educational and institutional initiatives impact, or not, on wider social and employment inequalities.
This paper measures the effects of undergraduate student loan debt on graduates’ post-college outcomes: employment, additional enrollment, family formation, home ownership, and net worth. The analysis uses data from a nationally representative sample of 2007–08 bachelor’s degree recipients. Because a graduate’s debt burden is not randomly assigned, we use an instrumental variable – enrollment-weighted average in-state tuition over four years – to estimate the effect of debt on post-baccalaureate outcomes while minimizing selection bias. We find that four years after graduating, undergraduate debt is related to borrowers’ earnings, job choice, decisions to marry and have children, and net worth.
Nearly half of all first-time undergraduates take a loan to pay for college, and many students will borrow tens of thousands of dollars by the time they leave. Low-income students and students of color borrow student loans more often and in larger amounts, yet attend less selective institutions, are more likely to drop out with debt. Among students who complete college, those with larger amounts of debt may struggle to pay back their loans or to invest in a house, family, or future education. Researchers are just beginning to untangle how the availability and use of student loans affects college access, educational attainment, and life after college, yet this topic has important implications for economic inequality and social stratification. In this article, we summarize what is known and what remains to be investigated, about the impact of student loan availability and use on college enrollment, degree completion, and postcollege outcomes.
Globalisation and the evolution of the knowledge-based economy have caused dramatic worldwide changes in the character and functions of education, particularly higher education. In the search for global competitiveness, many emerging economies have begun to expand their higher education systems, which has significantly affected the relationship between higher education and graduate employment. Recently, international comparative studies have suggested that increasing enrolment in higher education does not always promote upward social mobility, and can intensify inequality in education. This article critically examines the impact of the expansion of higher education in East Asia on graduate employment and social mobility in the context of an increasingly globalising economy and changing labour market needs. The article discusses emerging trends in the Greater China region, with a particular focus on Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Taipei, and argues that the massification of higher education has not necessarily led to more occupational opportunities for youth or opportunities for upward social movement, particularly since the significant changes in the global labour market after the 2008 global financial crisis. On the contrary, the intensification of ‘positional competition’ among college graduates seems to reflect growing social inequality.
A college degree is often viewed as a key step towards better employment and higher earnings. Many community college students, however, never graduate and cannot reap the financial benefits associated with a college degree. Although existing research suggests that financial aid interventions can modestly improve students' short-term academic outcomes, there is little rigorous evidence on the critical question of whether such interventions improve graduation rates or employment outcomes. This study helps to fill that gap using a randomized controlled trial involving over 2,000 community college students in Ohio. It focuses on a student population composed predominantly of low-income mothers. The study includes four years of post-random assignment data to examine the long-term impact of a performance-based scholarship program – financial aid that is contingent on academic performance – on degree receipt, employment, and earnings. The findings provide evidence that the one-year program made a lasting impact on students' credit accumulation – still evident after four years – and decreased the time it took students to earn a degree, but the study does not provide evidence of impacts on employment outcomes.
Rising student loan default rates and protests over debt suggest that many students make college enrollment and financing choices they regret. Policymakers have considered tying the availability of federally subsidized loans at degree programs to financial outcomes for past students. This paper considers the implementation of such a policy in Chile. We describe how loan repayment varied by degree type at baseline, the design of the loan reform, and how earnings-based loan caps change availability of loans and incentives for students and higher education institutions. We discuss the challenges facing policymakers seeking to link loan availability to earnings outcomes.
Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my knowledge, none have yet considered the impact of aid on earnings after college. This paper utilizes discontinuities in eligibility criteria for a large merit scholarship to examine the local impact of aid on student outcomes both during college and after college. The findings suggest that reducing the cost of community college does not impact persistence, academic performance, degree completion, expected earnings, or short-term earnings after college for marginally eligible students.
The concept of embeddedness has general applicability in the study of economic life and can alter theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of economic behaviors. Argues that in modern industrial societies, most economic action is embedded in structures of social relations. The author challenges the traditional economic theories that have both under- and oversocialized views of the conception of economic action and decisions that merge in their conception of economic actors atomized (separated) from their social context. Social relations are assumed to play on frictional and disruptive, not central, roles in market processes. There is, hence, a place and need for sociology in the study of economic life. Productive analysis of human action requires avoiding the atomization in the extremes of the over- and undersocialized concepts. Economic actors are neither atoms outside a social context nor slavish adherents to social scripts. The markets and hierarchies problem of Oliver Williamson (with a focus on the question of trust and malfeasance) is used to illustrate the use of embeddedness in explicating the proximate causes of patterns of macro-level interest. Answers to the problem of how economic life is not riddled with mistrust and malfeasance are linked to over- and undersocialized conceptions of human nature. The embeddedness argument, on the contrary, stresses the role of concrete personal relations and networks (or structures) in generating trust and discouraging malfeasance in economic life. It finds a middle way between the oversocialized (generalized morality) and undersocialized (impersonal institutional arrangements) approaches. The embeddedness approach opens the way for analysis of the influence of social structures on market behavior, specifically showing how business relations are intertwined with social and personal relations and networks. The approach can easily explain what looks otherwise like irrational behavior. (TNM)
Guía práctica para la evaluación de impacto
- G Becker
- R Bernal
- X Peña
Becker, G. (1964). Human capital. Columbia University Press.
Bernal, R., & Peña, X. (2011). Guía práctica para la evaluación de
impacto. Ediciones Uniandes.
Estudio de Procesos Administrativos de la Oficina de Cooperación Económica
- A Brito
- A Zambrano
Brito, A., & Zambrano, A. (2005). Estudio de Procesos Administrativos
de la Oficina de Cooperación Económica. Universidad Católica
Andrés Bello.