GSE Scholarly Articles

We explore the phenomenon of co-authorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most two economist co-authors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have three economist co-authors who share a surname, as well as the first where such co-authors are unrelated by marriage or blood.

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest-growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of enrollments in non-degree-granting postsecondary schools. We describe the schools, students, and programs in the for-profit higher education sector, its phenomenal recent growth, and its relationship to the federal and state governments. Using the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey, we assess outcomes of a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. We find that relative to these other institutions, for-profits educate a larger fraction of minority, disadvantaged, and older students, and they have greater success at retaining students in their first year and getting them to complete short programs at the certificate and AA levels. But we also find that for-profit students end up with higher unemployment and "idleness" rates and lower earnings six years after entering programs than do comparable students from other schools and that, not surprisingly, they have far greater default rates on their loans.

Research consistently shows that college choice in an important predictor of college completion and labor market outcomes. These longer term implications of college choice, combined with suboptimal choices made by many low-income but high-achieving students, has sparked several large-scale initiatives to improve college choice. Strategically targeting those students most susceptible to making questionable decisions in the college-choice process remains challenging, as variation in college choice is largely unexplained by easily measurable socio-demographic characteristics. This paper explores the potential to improve upon existing models and, more generally, to better understand college choice by documenting the similarities in college enrollment patterns between younger and older siblings. To do so, we identify siblings in the millions of SAT test-takers between the 2004 and 2011 high school graduation cohorts. We find that younger siblings enroll in the same college as their older sibling 21.2 percent of the time. Also, conditional on their own SAT scores, we find that younger siblings whose older siblings enrolled in four-year colleges and the most selective colleges are 17.4 and 21.3 percentage points, respectively, more likely to themselves enroll in four-year and the most selective colleges. Overall, adding characteristics and enrollment decisions of older siblings to standard college choice models improves model fit and consequently, are valuable pieces of information for explanatory and predictive power.