Earlier research led to similar findings
prospects.” Two months later, he was sitting in classes at Florida International.
The fate of students like Escanilla is crucial to today’s debate about who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree.
As it happens, two separate — and ambitious — recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the past two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don’t clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don’t attend any four-year college.
Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn’t, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college.
And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.
Roughly half the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found.
Strikingly, the students who initially enrolled in a four-year college were also about as likely to have earned a two-year degree as the other group was. That is, those who started on the more ambitious track were able to downshift, but most of those who started in community colleges struggled to make the leap to four-year colleges. That finding is consistent with other research showing that students do better when they stretch themselves and attend the most selective college that admits them, rather than “undermatching.”
Perhaps most important, the data show that the students just above the admissions cutoff earned substantially more by their late 20s than students just below it — 22 percent more on average, according to the Florida study, which was done by Seth Zimmerman, a Princeton economist who will soon move to the University of Chicago. “If you give these students a shot, they’re ready to succeed,” said Zimmerman, adding that he was surprised by the strength of the findings.
The results, said David Autor, an oft-cited labor economist at MIT (who was not an author of either study), are “really important.”
In many ways, the conclusions should not be surprising. Earlier research, albeit based on weaker data sets, had similar findings. More broadly, a long line of research has found that education usually pays off — for individuals and societies — in today’s technologically complex, globalized economy.
Yet the new findings also challenge a good bit of conventional wisdom about college. There are few surer ways to elicit murmurs of agreement than to claim that “college isn’t for everyone.” On both the political left and right, experts have taken to arguing that higher education is overrated. Some liberals seem worried that focusing on education distracts from other important economic issues, like Wall Street, the top 1 percent and the weakness of labor unions.
Many policymakers, for their part, prefer to emphasize an expansion of community college rather than four-year college. President Barack Obama has proposed making community college free for most students, as Tennessee and Chicago have done.
Enrolling more students in community colleges may well make economic sense. So, in all likelihood, would creating more and better vocational training, for well-paid jobs like medical technician and electrician, which don’t require a bachelor’s degree. The United States, Autor says, “massively underinvests” in such training.
Yet the new research is a reminder that the country also underinvests in enrolling students in four-year colleges — and making sure they graduate. Millions of people with the ability to earn a bachelor’s degree are not doing so, and many would benefit greatly from it.
A question that has always hungoverthesefindingsiswhether college itself deserves any credit for the patterns. You can imagine a scenario in which college graduates would thrive regardless of whether they went to college, because of their own skills and drives. By this same logic, helping more people become college graduates might not necessarily benefit them. But the new findings are the latest, and maybe strongest, reason to believe that college matters. Much as staying in high school is generally a better life strategy than dropping out, continuing on to college seems like the better plan for a great majority of students.
The skills and knowledge they gain from more time in school are certainly part of the explanation. Escanilla thinks that, at 15, he was not mature enough to take school seriously. A few years later, he understood that dreaming of rock stardom wasn’t a career plan.
“I fell in love with learning,” he recalls. With his parents suffering financial problems, he worked almost full time while in college. Finishingcollegetookhimalmost six years, but he graduated with a degree in liberal arts studies. He chose it over more utilitarian majors because he enjoyed studying subjects like literature and psychology.
After a few years of working as a salesman for BellSouth, persuading small businesses to buy high-end telecommunications equipment, he realized he wasn’t thrilled with his work. He had thought about going to graduate school after college but felt intimidated by it, as a first-generation college graduate.
By the time he was a married 28-year-old father of two, he was no longer intimidated and enrolled in a psychology program while working. Today, he is a psychotherapist at a local high school and also counsels adults as a professional coach.
But book learning isn’t anywhere near the full story of Escanilla’s growing up. His path also highlights another benefit that college can bring: Its graduates have managed to complete adulthood’s first major obstacle course. Doing so helps them learn how to finish other obstacle courses and gives them the confidence that they can, so long as they stay focused. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to calling grit.
“What I learned in college was kind of how to have this, ‘Yes, but how’ attitude,” Escanilla said. “You fall, dust yourself off and keep going.” He now assigns his high school students to visit the Florida International campus and soak in the atmosphere. “You don’t even need to talk to anybody,” he tells them. “Just walk around. There is something about that energy on campus that makes you want to be better.”
The biggest problem with the colleges that marginal students attend, like Florida International and several state colleges in Georgia, is how many students fall down and don’t figure out a way to keep going. Dropout rates typically hover around 50 percent, which leaves students with the grim combination of debt and no degree. Reducing these rates couldbringbigeconomicbenefits. Until that happens, some people have been left to wonder whether many teenagers should simply give up on the idea of college.
The answer to that question, however, seems to be a resounding no. Many community colleges have even higher dropout rates than four-year colleges. And most people with no college education are struggling mightily in the 21st-century economy.
Is college for everyone? Surely not. Some students are less prepared than Escanilla and won’t thrive as he did. Others would rather not spend four more years in school and can find rewarding, well-paying work as a medical technician, dental hygienist, police officer, plumber or other jobs that require a two-year degree or vocational training.
Yet the United States is in no danger of turning everyone into four-year college graduates. Only about a third of young adults today receive a bachelor’s degree. The new research confirms that many more teenagers have the ability to do so — and would benefit from it.
“It’s genuinely destructive to give people the message that we’re overinvesting in college, that we’re in a college-debt bubble, that you’ll end up as an unemployed ethnomusicologist with $200,000 in debt working at Starbucks,” said Autor, the MIT economist. “That’s not a message you would want to give to anyone you know who has kids.”