Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among students enrolled in the poorest third of schools, the effect is 7.3 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), business and economics. We find that test score effects at the time of the experiment are an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. (Ludwig & Miller, 2007;Deming, 2009;Angrist & Krueger, 1991;Dee, 2004;Lleras-Muney, 2005). But decisionmakers attempting to gauge the effectiveness of current education inputs, policies and practices in the present cannot wait decades for these long-term effects to emerge. SusanThey therefore rely upon short-term outcomes -primarily standardized test scores -as their yardstick of success.A critical question is the extent to which short-term improvements in test scores translate into long-term improvements in well-being. Puzzling results from several evaluations make this a salient question. Three small-scale, intensive preschool experiments produced large effects on contemporaneous test scores that quickly faded (Schweinhart, et al., 2005;Anderson, 2008). Quasi-experimental evaluations of Head Start, a preschool program for poor children, reveal a similar pattern, with test score effects gone by middle school. In each of these studies, treatment effects have reemerged in adulthood as increased educational attainment, enhanced labor market attachment, and reduced crime (Deming, 2009;Garces, Thomas, & Currie, 2002;Ludwig & Miller, 2007). Further, several recent papers have shown large impacts of charter schools on test scores of disadvantaged children (Abdulkadiroglu, et al., 2011;Angrist, et al., 2012;Dobbie & Fryer, 2011). A critical question is whether these effects on test scores will persist in the form of long-term enhancements to human capital and wellbeing.We examine the effect of smaller classes on educational attainment in adulthood, including college attendance, degree completion and field of study. We exploit random variation in class size in the early grades of elementary school created by the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Experiment. Participants in the STAR experiment are now in their thirties, an age at which it is plausible to measure 1 completed education. Our postsecondary outcome data is obtained from th...

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