In the past thirty years educational attainments in the United States have stagnated, particularly for low-income Americans. As a result, income-related gaps in educational attainments have grown. These gaps are important because education has historically been the key mechanism for intergenerational socio-economic mobility in the U.S. While the…

In this paper, the authors examine how information that students receive about their academic performance affects their decisions to enroll in post-secondary education. In particular, they look at one specific piece of data--student performance on the state standardized mathematics test in grades 8 and 10 in Massachusetts. One key feature of such…