Student Loans and Social Mobility

Ebrahimian, Mehran

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3680159

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Average math and reading test scores for elite admits are roughly 100 points above the average for all admitted students, and 200 points above the average for all test takers. 14 Though both elite business-focused programs and medical programs have high mean incomes, the distribution of income within these programs is very different. Panel B of Figure 1 plots the density of income by percentile of the test-taker income distribution for students admitted to the business-focused programs at PUC and UC and for students admitted to the medical programs at the same universities.…”

Section: Which Degree Programs Lead To Top Outcomes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Above the ninety-ninth percentile, the density of the income distribution for medical admits falls, while the density for business admits rises. Elite business admits have incomes in the top 0.1 percent of the distribution in 1.6 percent 14 The standardized admissions exam is normed to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100 across all test takers in each subject in each year. Some students take the exam in multiple years, and in this table I report scores for the first time students take the exam.…”

Section: Which Degree Programs Lead To Top Outcomes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes

Zimmerman

2019

American Economic Review

155

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This paper asks whether elite colleges help students outside of historically advantaged groups reach top positions in the economy. I combine administrative data on income and leadership teams at publicly traded firms with a regression discontinuity design based on admissions rules at elite business-focused degree programs in Chile. The 1.8 percent of college students admitted to these programs account for 41 percent of leadership positions and 39 percent of top 0.1 percent incomes. Admission raises the number of leadership positions students hold by 44 percent and their probability of attaining a top 0.1 percent income by 51 percent. However, these gains are driven by male applicants from high-tuition private high schools, with zero effects for female students or students from other school types with similar admissions test scores. Admissions effects are equal to 38 percent of the gap in rates of top attainment by gender and 54 percent of the gap by high school background for male students. A difference-in-differences analysis of the rates at which pairs of students lead the same firms suggests that peer ties formed between college classmates from similar backgrounds may play an important role in driving the observed effects. (JEL I23, I26, J16, O15)

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Section: Which Degree Programs Lead To Top Outcomes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Which Degree Programs Lead To Top Outcomes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes

Zimmerman

2019

American Economic Review

155

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Our paper builds on a voluminous literature that has documented a prominent role of family income and family composition both in determining pre-college academic achievement (Dahl and Lochner (2012), Caucutt et al (2017), Blandin and Herrington (2022), Ebrahimian (2023)), and college entry decisions and graduation outcomes (e.g. Belley and Lochner (2007)), even after controlling for initial conditions at high school graduation (see, e.g., Leukhina (2023).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%