Quality Matters Assessing the Impact of Attending

Authors: Tatiana Melguizo

Publish Date: 2007/11/08

Volume: 49, Issue: 3, Pages: 214-236

PDF Link

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of attending different categories of selective institutions on students’ college completion Specifically it explores differences in the impact that selectivity of an institution has by race and ethnicity The analysis accounts for the impact of individual and institutional characteristics and corrects for omitted variables with proxies for student motivation The results suggest that students who attend the most selective institutions and highly selective institutions as opposed to nonselective ones are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree This result holds for African American and Hispanic students After correcting for the problem of sorting of students into specific types of institutions the results of the models suggest that the coefficient of selective institutions might have a small upward bias The positive effect of selective institutions on attainment suggests that they have the potential to increase the graduation rates of minorities while narrowing the persistent college completion gapI would like to thank Martin Carnoy Susanna Loeb Myra Strober Anthony Antonio and Edward Vytlacil for their generous advice Special thanks to all the participants of the Economics of Education seminar at Stanford University I am also grateful to Ronald G Ehrenberg Amaury Nora Michael Olivas and the rest of participants of the Houston Education Finance Round Table Additionally I would like to thank Estela Bensimon Alicia Dowd Greg Kienzl Mariana Alfonso Liang Zang Sara Raab Josipa Roksa and William G Tierney for their comments on the most recent version of this paper I also benefited from the generous and insightful guidance of two anonymous reviewers and the editor This research was supported by a grant from the American Education Research Association which receives funds for its “AERA Grants Program” from the National Center of Education Statistics and the Office of Education Sciences US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant REC9980573 Opinions reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies

Keywords: