Essays On Education And Family Economics

Author : Morgan Kusler Taylor
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (624 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Morgan Kusler Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on higher education and students' decision-making processes regarding their choices of academic disciplines, persistence, and modes of attrition. The first chapter is motivated by the underrepresentation of women in quantitatively oriented academic fields such as STEM, business, and economics. Some scholars have noted that the grade levels in these fields are substantially lower on average, and hypothesize that female students exhibit relatively stronger sensitivity to the grades they receive. This paper undertakes an examination of these issues using the rich Indiana University data set. We find that the phenomenon of women's stronger sensitivity to grades, as measured by their decisions about persisting in a chosen discipline, holds for STEM, business, and economics but does not universally extend to other academic disciplines. This empirical dichotomy suggests that stronger sensitivity to grades, rather than being a gender-specific characteristic, is more likely to reflect gender differences in the underlying preferences for academic fields.The second chapter analyzes the risky endeavor of enrolling in college with initially incomplete information, which can result in a student's decision to drop out without completing a degree. This paper studies the dropout decisions among students who abandon their initially chosen disciplines. This is the sub-population of students who are likely to have received negative feedback in terms of their performance in the initially chosen disciplines and are thus compelled to act on this information by choosing a mode of exiting, i.e., switching to an alternative discipline or dropping out. Our main focus is on how dropout probabilities conditional on exit from an initial discipline differ between men and women and how this difference depends on the discipline from which the student is departing and students' grade performance there. Our key empirical finding is that the direction of gender differences in conditional dropout propensities is field-dependent. Specifically, while men exhibit higher propensity than women to use the dropout mode of exit when they decide against persisting in STEM or Business and Economics, this phenomenon does not carry over to other starting academic categories, such as Social Sciences and Humanities, Education, and other professional schools.The third chapter begins by acknowledging that college students initially matriculate with incomplete information about their academic ability, interests, or the requirements for success in college. In this paper we examine the impact of student characteristics such as family income and gender on the initial choice of college discipline, persistence in it, or its subsequent adjustment. Using comprehensive student data provided by Indiana University Learning Analytics, we are able to explore whether such impact is discipline-specific. We show, in particular, that there is a positive correlation between family income and consistency of initial choices, i.e., persistence, is seen across all broad academic categories for both men and women, except for Social Sciences and Humanities where the magnitude of the effect of income is notably smaller, if not negligible. The paper also offers new evidence that higher education, rather than being a vehicle for social mobility, tends to strengthen the advantage gap between students from different family income levels.