A college degree often translates into economic success: Americans who start at the bottom of the income ladder "quadruple" their chances of making it to the top when they earn a four-year degree, according to past research by the Pew Economic Mobility Project. Nevertheless, many young people from the bottom and middle of the ladder…

The higher education system in the United States is characterized by a large degree of quality heterogeneity, and there is a growing literature suggesting students attending higher quality universities have better educational and labor market outcomes. In this paper, we use NLSY97 data combined with the difference in the timing and strength of the…

Analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-88 shows the main source of difference in black-white wages to be racial differences in quality, not quantity, of schooling. Closing the racial gap in basic skills learned could reduce wage differences by two-thirds. (SK)

Uses a flexible modeling strategy to examine the roles of measured ability, family characteristics, and proxies for secondary schooling quality as determinants of the decision to enter college. Finds that the link functions and estimated impacts of ability and family characteristics on the probabilities of enrolling in college are not constant…

This chapter presents a study which used data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine racial differences in the effects of college quality and student diversity on wages. The study investigated whether the economic benefit of college quality might be higher for groups helped by diversity programs and whether a…

Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, this study finds that education rates of return vary across racial/ethnic groups because of differing human capital investments made by families in each group. School quality also matters. Nearly the entire white/black earnings gap would disappear if black children had school and home…

Issues related to assessing school-to-work transitions in the United States were discussed in the context of selected findings from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a longitudinal data set characterizing 9,964 of 12,686 of young people who were 14-22 years old when first interviewed in 1979. The first section of the paper…

Examines earnings differentials across individual and institutional characteristics for college graduates, using national longitudinal data. Graduates from highly selective colleges and universities (and research universities) earn significantly more than graduates from less selective colleges or public institutions. Gender and racial returns vary…