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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.[/quote]

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

[/quote]

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff.  A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.[/quote]

The "folk wisdom" on this is total bullshit. Even accounting for the huge differences between the average student who goes to college and one who does not, there is very good evidence from very good administrative data that going to college causes one's earnings to go up, even for the most marginal students.

See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w32296

Also notice in that paper that it's not just the individual rate of return to college students that is large. The "social" rate of return is large too. That's another way of saying that when people spread this folk wisdom to discourage people from going to college, they are making the world worse off, full stop.[/quote]

Does that account that marginally admitted students are likely more well off to begin with.  You know like the Varsity Blues sting where rich kids were cheating to get in.  I was the opposite I was an exceptional student with a free ride(with fafsa), but very little return on the college degree.   It took me nearly ten years to get a job in the field and am still making median wages for my area.

Higher education is nothing but a social sorting system.[/quote]

Actually, yes, the study does deal with this pretty effectively, although the potential issue is kind of the opposite of what you're implying.

The study is using the various SAT/ACT cutoffs at public schools in Texas, only comparing people who are within a few test score points of the cutoff. These cutoffs have a big impact on admissions probability, but they are imperfect, because some students get in anyway (Figure 2). The students just above and below the cutoff look almost identical across all all the observable characteristics in the data (Figures 3 and 4), so there isn't an obvious bump that would exist if, for example, wealthier families were cheating on the SATs to get above the cutoff.

But, since the cutoffs aren't 100% binding, there is still a concern that wealthier families might be finding other ways to get in despite being below the SAT/ACT cutoffs. The standard econ toolkit in this case adjusts for this by statistically identifying "compliers", i.e. people who only go if they exceed the cutoff, because they don't find another way in. Comparing columns 4 and 5 of table 1, you can see that although the compliers are pretty similar to the other marginal applicants, there is some suggestive evidence that they may be a bit more economically disadvantaged. For example, compliers are more likely to be black and a bit less likely to be male.

But, the key thing is, the estimated effects of scoring above the threshold are for these compliers. In other words, this study measures the impact precisely on a subset of students that are not able to otherwise game the system, to use your words. More importantly, if the study is doing a bad job of this statistical adjustment (I don't think it is), then the estimated impact of going to college would likely be underestimated, not overestimated as you're suggesting. This is because SAT/ACT scores have a weaker relationship to eventual college attendance among wealthier people, so you'd be capturing some of the earnings effects of going to college in both sides of the cutoff

tl;dr yes the research is good. You have the link. Read the paper and quit with the folk wisdom bullshitting that is harming high school graduates by talking them out of one of the best investments they can make.[/quote]

Your research just isn't consistent with other "high quality" research, showing nominal or negative benefit for kids from modest backgrounds going to inexpensive schools.  I would attribute the effect to being that marginally qualified that end up going to college are more likely wealthy. I'm glad your statistics bear that out somewhat.

https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-from-college-what-the-data-say/

A little more than folk wisdom here.[/quote]

First of all, to quote that same author in the report where they outline their ROI methodology, the best causal evidence is pretty clear: "In the academic literature, rigorous causal estimates of the financial return to college tend to lag the raw earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates, though the causal return to college is still substantial. In other words, if college graduates had not gone to college, they would have still earned significantly more than the average high school graduate."

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/higher-educations-return-on-investment-methodology/

The same conclusion is borne out in Figure 2 of the report you cite--on average, almost all types of programs show a positive ROI.

That said, without going deeply into methods, Cooper has to do a lot of work and modeling to account for the fact that his most comprehensive data source only includes financial aid applicants, only includes graduates (not all attendees), and only includes average earnings for the first few years after graduation. There are a lot of assumptions baked into this modeling, all of which are negated by the use of administrative enrollment and earnings records in the Mountjoy paper. Even if one is comfortable with those assumptions on average, one should be cautious about how they affect interpretation at the margins.

More importantly, the existence of lower-return colleges that predominantly attract students from modest backgrounds underscores the original point. The Trump administration is, pointedly, not trying to dismantle such schools. They're going after elite institutions that they see as a potential check on their power. These are not the low return schools in Cooper's study. If cutting funding to top universities causes some of those students to attend lower-ROI institutions instead, that is unequivocally bad for students and for economic well-being. It's only good for the people consolidating power.

Finally, a huge portion (possibly the bulk) of the value of R-1 institutions isn't the education they provide to undergraduates. It's the value of the research they produce, much of which simply wouldn't happen if they didn't exist. None of these studies are trying to measure that impact, so they have nothing to say about what cutting down on research will do.[/quote]

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