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The supply of college-educated workers: the roles of college premia, college costs, and risk

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Abstract

Despite a large measured college premium, roughly one-third of all high-school graduates currently do not enroll in any form of college. Moreover, while recent increases in the premium have been accompanied by increases in enrollment, college attainment has remained flat. Our paper studies the roles played by college premia, college costs, and risk, ceteris paribus, for college enrollment and attainment in a simple quantitative model of risky college investment. Our results suggest that most U.S. high-school completers are currently inframarginal with respect to the college premium. We find, however, that the levels of current premia, costs, and uninsurable risks all matter for this. Our results imply that, barring improvements in collegiate preparedness and attrition rates, high and persistent college premia, with high attendant levels of earnings inequality, may accompany the shift in demand towards skilled labor, which recent work (e.g., Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003)) suggests is under way.

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  • Kartik B. Athreya & Janice Eberly, 2013. "The supply of college-educated workers: the roles of college premia, college costs, and risk," Working Paper 13-02, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedrwp:13-02
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    Cited by:

    1. Gonzalo Castex, 2017. "College risk and return," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 26, pages 91-112, October.
    2. Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee & Yongseok Shin & Donghoon Lee, 2015. "The Option Value of Human Capital: Higher Education and Wage Inequality," NBER Working Papers 21724, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Kartik B. Athreya & Felicia Ionescu & Urvi Neelakantan & Ivan Vidangos, 2020. "Who Values Access to College?," Richmond Fed Economic Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue 20-03, pages 1-5, March.
    4. Grey Gordon & Aaron Hedlund, 2017. "Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition," NBER Chapters, in: Education, Skills, and Technical Change: Implications for Future US GDP Growth, pages 357-394, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Kartik Athreya & Felicia Ionescu & Ivan Vidangos & Urvi Neelakantan, 2018. "Investment Opportunities and Economic Outcomes: Who Benefits From College and the Stock Market?," 2018 Meeting Papers 1151, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    6. John Bailey Jones & Fang Yang, 2016. "Skill-Biased Technical Change and the Cost of Higher Education," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(3), pages 621-662.
    7. Yang, Guanyi, 2018. "Endogenous Skills and Labor Income Inequality," MPRA Paper 89638, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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