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Title: Heterogeneous Returns to College over the Life Course
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Cheng, Siwei
Brand, Jennie E.
Zhou, Xiang
Xie, Yu
Hout, Michael
Heterogeneous Returns to College over the Life Course
Science Advances 7,51 (15 December 2021): DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg7641.
Also: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg7641
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Science
Keyword(s): College Graduates; High School Completion/Graduates; Modeling, Growth Curve/Latent Trajectory Analysis; Propensity Scores; Wages

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

College graduates earn higher wages than high school graduates by age 30. Among women, the advantages of a college degree decline somewhat as they age, although they are still substantial at age 50; for men, the advantage of a college degree grows throughout the life cycle. Most previous research on returns to higher education has focused on income at a single point in time or averaged over multiple years; our contribution is to study how returns vary by age. We also document how these patterns vary by the propensity of graduating from college. We find modest wage returns for mid-propensity college graduates, but large returns for low-propensity and, for men, high-propensity college graduates. Our results rely on propensity score-based matching combined with multilevel growth curve models applied to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort.
Bibliography Citation
Cheng, Siwei, Jennie E. Brand, Xiang Zhou, Yu Xie and Michael Hout. "Heterogeneous Returns to College over the Life Course." Science Advances 7,51 (15 December 2021): DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg7641.