David Leonhardt: A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. … Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data … and the new version comes to the same conclusion. (
It sounds as though they're generating p-values for a lot of different groups. Are the low p-values on the factors you're looking at isolated, or did you use a multiple comparisons correction?
I think if you read more of his posts, you'll see he does this with all sorts of stuff. Examples: "med" , "docs" , “shoulds”, “wants” and, importantly for your concern, the gender-specific "cads" and "dads".
cournot, I was referring to job status, not job quality. To the extent that money buys status (which it does in the USA), salary determines job status.
In your example you talked about high status and low status jobs with a $250K income level. I don't think there are any low status jobs that earn $250K as you suggest. I would like to see a few examples of jobs that earn $250K that are low status.
I can see someone exchanging marginal income for marginal status, and maybe to those making $2.5M income perceive all $250K jobs to be low status, and maybe those making $250K feel like they have low status compared to those making $2.5M, but do they feel they have low status compared to anyone making $25K? I don't think so.
I don't know if Robin posted about it, but Paul Krugman did.
Job status is about status relative to other jobs, and status is a social measure that has been monetized in todays economy. The more money you have, the more status you have. Maybe there are some exceptions, but as far as I can tell, essentially no one really says that except the wealthy when they are trying to justify why wealth should not be important to the poor, and then they are simply being disingenuous.
It is simply not correct that economists only measure job quality by income. To see the absurdity of the statement, ask yourself how many top professors can be lured away to lower level departments by a mere ten or twenty percent salary raise. Economists have long understood the role of compensating differentials. It is you who are mistaken. The fact that good jobs are correlated with high incomes does not mean that tradeoffs don't exist and are well understood by the profession. So while I accept that income measures are a good first cut, ignoring the boost to the status (as well as comfort, location, flexibility, etc.) aspects of job search understates the potential benefits of the elite schools. Dale and Krueger acknowledge this in their earlier version but don't treat it at all in the new paper.
"fems" is a pretty poor abbreviation for "women", which suggests that something else is causing this extremely odd choice of language. It's almost dehumanising.
You are right that we only reported five estimates for women in the paper, two of which are significant. However, as is common in empirical research, we estimated models that are not reported in the paper to probe the robustness of the results (for example, regressions with different measures of school quality, with different minimum wage thresholds, for the 1989 cohort, for specific years, etc.). The estimated return to school characteristics was generally not statistically significant for women. Also, as is common in research, we did not mention the results from every model we estimated in the paper. Rather, we discussed those results that were robust to a wide variety of specifications and most central to the paper. The paper is not about gender differences from college selectivity, and we have little reason to suspect that there are such differences.
Thanks for responding. I'm happy to accept that the 23% figure is misleadingly high, for the reasons you suggest. On the differing effect on women, see my added to the post.
Hanson misinterprets our research, and weaves the popular coverage of our studies into a grand conspiracy. While nothing sinister is going on, there is quite a bit of confusion, as Hanson mistakenly combined our published abstract with results from our original working paper and drew conclusions from the wrong column of estimates.
While we did report a 23% return associated with attending the most selective colleges (according to the 1982 Barron’s ranking) in our earliest working paper, these results were from our basic model--which does NOT adjust for student unobserved characteristics. The numbers Hanson emphasizes are the straw man that we were seeking to test. In our matched applicant model – which was the new contribution of our research -- the return was much smaller and statistically insignificant for men and women. Our final published paper (in the Quarterly Journal of Economics)—and the abstract Hanson links to--did not focus on the original Barron's result because we later obtained three additional years of the Barron's index from the late 1970s (when the students in the sample entered college), and only the version from 1982 suggested a possible relationship between the Barron’s index and earnings. And even this one outlying Barron’s result appeared to be extremely sensitive to how one or two colleges were categorized in the Barron’s index. In the published version of our paper, we specified the Barron’s Index in the same way as Brewer, Ehrenberg and Eide did, and we found that attending a higher ranked school according to the Barron’s Index was not related to subsequent earnings once similar students were compared.
The goal of our current paper is to see if our earlier results are robust over the course of student’s career and to extend our estimates for a recent cohort of students. After controlling for student’s unobserved characteristics, the return to college selectivity was not significantly greater than zero for men or for women. In a handful of specifications, the return was less than zero for women, but in the vast majority of specifications that we examined it was not statistically different from zero, so any explanations about why the payoff may be negative for women is pure speculation, and probably unwarranted. The most likely reason for the occasional negative payoff for women is that it was due to random sampling error.
If I'm reading this right, a woman with a given SAT score will make less money if the college she went to had a higher average SAT. Robin has not mentioned what statistical effect the woman's (or man's) SAT score has on future earnings. My guess is that women (possibly more than men) who go to schools where there are lots of people smarter than they are more likely to major in departments which don't provide meal-ticket degrees.
"Anecdotally, I’ve a hard time imagining most of the elite college fems I know settling for a lighter career while marrying a higher-earning mate."
I have no problem believing it. My high school had about a 95% college grad rate (not a typo - private college prep), but I was surprised that many of the girls dropped out of the labor force by about our 15 year reunion. In talking to them, I discovered that many of your volunteer-led organizations (PTA, soccer, etc.) are probably run by these highly educated, highly motivated supermoms.
That article is ridiculous in its obliviousness. Lewis starts with an unexamined assumption--that the traditional "women's work" of managing a household and raising children is trivial, worthless work--that leads him into a hilarious befuddlement when faced with what's actually a completely straightfoward arrangement.
The confusion vanishes if you revise the assumption. Start with a belief that managing a household and raising children is real and valuable work, and of course it makes sense that a successful man would "hire" the most intelligent, capable woman he can find for the position. It also dissolves the mystery around her willingness to accept the role--she's not "embarrassed by her situation" because she knows the value of the work she does. This woman is not lounging around eating bon-bons and watching soap operas. She's managing the servants, overseeing her husband's personal health and quite possibly his personal finances as well, maintaining the social relationships that will be invaluable to him in his career, almost certainly continuing to serve his company in what amounts to an unpaid advisory capacity, *and* she's caring for his children and overseeing their education. She's busy, and both she and he know that the work she does is important.
I am not complaining about the rich, I am complaining about the rich complaining about being poor.
It sounds as though they're generating p-values for a lot of different groups. Are the low p-values on the factors you're looking at isolated, or did you use a multiple comparisons correction?
It's sad to complain about the rich. It makes you look like a loser.
I think if you read more of his posts, you'll see he does this with all sorts of stuff. Examples: "med" , "docs" , “shoulds”, “wants” and, importantly for your concern, the gender-specific "cads" and "dads".
Kudos to me:
http://www.overcomingbias.c...
cournot, I was referring to job status, not job quality. To the extent that money buys status (which it does in the USA), salary determines job status.
In your example you talked about high status and low status jobs with a $250K income level. I don't think there are any low status jobs that earn $250K as you suggest. I would like to see a few examples of jobs that earn $250K that are low status.
I can see someone exchanging marginal income for marginal status, and maybe to those making $2.5M income perceive all $250K jobs to be low status, and maybe those making $250K feel like they have low status compared to those making $2.5M, but do they feel they have low status compared to anyone making $25K? I don't think so.
I don't know if Robin posted about it, but Paul Krugman did.
http://krugman.blogs.nytime...
Job status is about status relative to other jobs, and status is a social measure that has been monetized in todays economy. The more money you have, the more status you have. Maybe there are some exceptions, but as far as I can tell, essentially no one really says that except the wealthy when they are trying to justify why wealth should not be important to the poor, and then they are simply being disingenuous.
Daedalus2u,
It is simply not correct that economists only measure job quality by income. To see the absurdity of the statement, ask yourself how many top professors can be lured away to lower level departments by a mere ten or twenty percent salary raise. Economists have long understood the role of compensating differentials. It is you who are mistaken. The fact that good jobs are correlated with high incomes does not mean that tradeoffs don't exist and are well understood by the profession. So while I accept that income measures are a good first cut, ignoring the boost to the status (as well as comfort, location, flexibility, etc.) aspects of job search understates the potential benefits of the elite schools. Dale and Krueger acknowledge this in their earlier version but don't treat it at all in the new paper.
I added again to the post in reply.
You have clearly never read The Wealth Of Nations...
"fems" is a pretty poor abbreviation for "women", which suggests that something else is causing this extremely odd choice of language. It's almost dehumanising.
You are right that we only reported five estimates for women in the paper, two of which are significant. However, as is common in empirical research, we estimated models that are not reported in the paper to probe the robustness of the results (for example, regressions with different measures of school quality, with different minimum wage thresholds, for the 1989 cohort, for specific years, etc.). The estimated return to school characteristics was generally not statistically significant for women. Also, as is common in research, we did not mention the results from every model we estimated in the paper. Rather, we discussed those results that were robust to a wide variety of specifications and most central to the paper. The paper is not about gender differences from college selectivity, and we have little reason to suspect that there are such differences.
Thanks for responding. I'm happy to accept that the 23% figure is misleadingly high, for the reasons you suggest. On the differing effect on women, see my added to the post.
Hanson misinterprets our research, and weaves the popular coverage of our studies into a grand conspiracy. While nothing sinister is going on, there is quite a bit of confusion, as Hanson mistakenly combined our published abstract with results from our original working paper and drew conclusions from the wrong column of estimates.
While we did report a 23% return associated with attending the most selective colleges (according to the 1982 Barron’s ranking) in our earliest working paper, these results were from our basic model--which does NOT adjust for student unobserved characteristics. The numbers Hanson emphasizes are the straw man that we were seeking to test. In our matched applicant model – which was the new contribution of our research -- the return was much smaller and statistically insignificant for men and women. Our final published paper (in the Quarterly Journal of Economics)—and the abstract Hanson links to--did not focus on the original Barron's result because we later obtained three additional years of the Barron's index from the late 1970s (when the students in the sample entered college), and only the version from 1982 suggested a possible relationship between the Barron’s index and earnings. And even this one outlying Barron’s result appeared to be extremely sensitive to how one or two colleges were categorized in the Barron’s index. In the published version of our paper, we specified the Barron’s Index in the same way as Brewer, Ehrenberg and Eide did, and we found that attending a higher ranked school according to the Barron’s Index was not related to subsequent earnings once similar students were compared.
The goal of our current paper is to see if our earlier results are robust over the course of student’s career and to extend our estimates for a recent cohort of students. After controlling for student’s unobserved characteristics, the return to college selectivity was not significantly greater than zero for men or for women. In a handful of specifications, the return was less than zero for women, but in the vast majority of specifications that we examined it was not statistically different from zero, so any explanations about why the payoff may be negative for women is pure speculation, and probably unwarranted. The most likely reason for the occasional negative payoff for women is that it was due to random sampling error.
If I'm reading this right, a woman with a given SAT score will make less money if the college she went to had a higher average SAT. Robin has not mentioned what statistical effect the woman's (or man's) SAT score has on future earnings. My guess is that women (possibly more than men) who go to schools where there are lots of people smarter than they are more likely to major in departments which don't provide meal-ticket degrees.
"Anecdotally, I’ve a hard time imagining most of the elite college fems I know settling for a lighter career while marrying a higher-earning mate."
I have no problem believing it. My high school had about a 95% college grad rate (not a typo - private college prep), but I was surprised that many of the girls dropped out of the labor force by about our 15 year reunion. In talking to them, I discovered that many of your volunteer-led organizations (PTA, soccer, etc.) are probably run by these highly educated, highly motivated supermoms.
That article is ridiculous in its obliviousness. Lewis starts with an unexamined assumption--that the traditional "women's work" of managing a household and raising children is trivial, worthless work--that leads him into a hilarious befuddlement when faced with what's actually a completely straightfoward arrangement.
The confusion vanishes if you revise the assumption. Start with a belief that managing a household and raising children is real and valuable work, and of course it makes sense that a successful man would "hire" the most intelligent, capable woman he can find for the position. It also dissolves the mystery around her willingness to accept the role--she's not "embarrassed by her situation" because she knows the value of the work she does. This woman is not lounging around eating bon-bons and watching soap operas. She's managing the servants, overseeing her husband's personal health and quite possibly his personal finances as well, maintaining the social relationships that will be invaluable to him in his career, almost certainly continuing to serve his company in what amounts to an unpaid advisory capacity, *and* she's caring for his children and overseeing their education. She's busy, and both she and he know that the work she does is important.