The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study

Abstract

We study employers ' The large increase in the US college wage premium since 1980 strongly suggests that the supply of educated labor has not kept pace with its demand (Goldin and Katz 2008; Autor 2014). One impediment is that inflation-adjusted state funding of postsecondary education has stagnated since the mid-1990s and declined substantially in the last decade. The result is higher net tuition and fees for college students in public institutions (Baum and Ma 2014). Somewhat counteracting that trend is a marked increase in the generosity of federal Title IV financial aid. The for-profit sector has taken advantage of federal government largesse, as well as the increased demand for educated workers, to enlarge its presence in the postsecondary education market. For-profit colleges offer highly structured programs at convenient times and formats, and many have argued-at least going back to Freeman (1974)-that the for-profits respond more rapidly to changing employer demands than do public sector schools. For-profit institutions have expanded recently in fast-growing areas such as health and information technology.

Ethnic and social class discrimination in education: Experimental evidence from Germany

“…However, we argue that experimental studies on ethnic discrimination, when using names or pictures (e.g., Deming et al, 2016;Weichselbaumer, 2016;Jacquemet & Yannelis, 2012;Sprietsma, 2013;van Ewijk, 2011), apply treatments that potentially carry both ethnic and social class signals (for this and similar arguments see Gaddis, 2015Gaddis, , 2017aBertrand & Mullainathan, 2004;Figlio, 2005;Fryer Jr & Levitt, 2004). So, these studies will typically not identify ethnic discrimination according to the definition above, but confound ethnic with social class discrimination (cf.…”

Demand Effects in Survey Experiments: An Empirical Assessment

“…We suspect this difference stems from varying context. The original study was a field experiment conducted on actual employers relative to the survey experiment on a convenience sample that is used here [though a recent labor market field experiment (Deming et al 2016), also failed to find consistent race effects]. Nevertheless, we include results from the resumé experiment below because our interest is primarily in how revealing an experiment’s hypothesis affects respondent behavior, not the effect of the treatment in the original study.…”

Understanding the “How” and “Why” Aspects of Racial-Ethnic Discrimination: A Multimethod Approach to Audit Studies

“…Beyond the traditional contexts of discrimination in employment (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Deming et al 2016; Gaddis 2015; Pager 2003; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; Pedulla 2018a) and housing (Carpusor and Loges 2006; Ewens, Tomlin, and Wang 2014; Galster and Godfrey 2005; Turner et al 2002), researchers have documented racial-ethnic discrimination in banking and economic transactions (Ayers 1991; Ayers and Siegelman 1995; Doleac and Stein 2013; Hanson et al 2016); admission to nightclubs (May and Goldsmith 2018); scheduling of medical appointments (Kugelmass 2016; Sharma, Mitra, and Stano 2015); communication with church representatives (Wright et al 2015), college admissions counselors (Thornhill 2018), professors (Milkman et al 2012, 2015), and public officials (Butler and Broockman 2011; Einstein and Glick 2017; White, Nathan, and Faller 2015); and on Airbnb (Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky 2017), Craigslist (Gaddis and Ghoshal 2017, 2019), and Uber (Ge et al 2016). The literature suggests that racial-ethnic discrimination is prevalent across multiple and diverse contexts, knows no geographic bounds, and has been widespread for decades.…”