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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Will Jones @willpjones.bsky.social · Jul 20

This is one of the most important, and least understood, details in the value of higher education - it's benefits are reaped very differently by rich and poor students.

Opinion | How higher education failed America’s poor

For decades, policymakers claimed to expand college access. In reality, they rerouted poor students into the least valuable degrees.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Robert Kelchen @robertkelchen.com · May 19

This depressing new NBER working paper finds that while the returns to a college education are still clearly positive for everyone, the benefits for students from lower-income families have declined over time due to fewer resources going to regional institutions.

Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

www.nber.org

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · Jun 7

Interesting! You're right to point out that history is the highest-wage HUM majors, but we do put it in that category.

Most of our surveys only report one major; when they have two, we just take the first. We could randomize instead; I wonder if your EDU students would list history first or second!

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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Florencia Torche @ftorche.bsky.social · May 19

Important paper by Bleemer and Quincy: Since 1960, the college wage premium has become less equal. Lower-income students now get far less out of college than their higher-income peers.

www.nber.org/papers/w33797

Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

www.nber.org

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

If you have questions about, e.g.:

1. Things it's not: selection into college/the Ivy League/selectivity and the SAT/rising tuition;
2. Causal interpretability;
3. What about women;
4. Details on data construction;

or more, you should definitely take a look at the full study!

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Thanks for reading! You can find an ungated version of the study here:

zacharybleemer.com/wp-content/u...

zacharybleemer.com

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

If lower-income kids still got the same relative value from going to college as in 1960 – even holding fixed *who* goes to college – then intergenerational income transmission in the US would fall ~25%.

This explains most of the decline in economic mobility since the '60s.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Altogether, changes in institutional returns (30%), major composition (25%), and two-year and for-profit composition (20%) explain most of the regressivity trend.

This is why going to college has become less valuable for poor students.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

The for-profit sector peaked in the 2000s and has dramatically shrunk. But recent growth of the community colleges disproportionately holds poor students back.

Poor students' diversion to these lower-value colleges explains about 20% of the rise in collegiate regressivity.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Trend 3️⃣ explaining the rise of collegiate regressivity is the growth of community colleges and the for-profit sector.

Students who attend these schools derive lower value-added from them. Since the 1980s, those students have been disproportionately poor.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Today, 10% of male college graduates earn CS degrees. It's doubled in 10 years.

Most of that growth was driven by rich students, making college more regressive.

Why? As I've shown before, universities exclude poor students from CS using restrictions: x.com/zbleemer/sta...

Zachary Bleemer on X: "**New paper** Over the past 20 years (but not before!), Black and Hispanic college graduates have been steadily earning degrees in relatively lower-paying majors. The main culprit? An increasingly-common public university policy. A thread. #EconTwitter https://t.co/FgvmSoIsqe https://t.co/t8yzRaQMY4" / X

**New paper** Over the past 20 years (but not before!), Black and Hispanic college graduates have been steadily earning degrees in relatively lower-paying majors. The main culprit? An increasingly-common public university policy. A thread. #EconTwitter https://t.co/FgvmSoIsqe https://t.co/t8yzRaQMY4

x.com

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

We all know that the humanities are shrinking. It turns out that most of that decline is coming from rich students.

Possibly for the first time ever, poor students are now more likely to be humanities majors than rich students.

That's bad for economic mobility.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Sometimes, like in the 1920s or the 1990s, poor and rich college students earn similar-value majors.

Today, though, poor students earn much lower-paying majors than the rich. This explains 25% of regressivity.

Two disciplines are most at fault: humanities and computer science.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Trend 2️⃣ driving collegiate regressivity is the most surprising. This one is about college majors.

There are huge differences in wage value across majors. They haven't changed much over time.

Humanities at the bottom. Engineering at the top. The gap has widened.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

If colleges' value-added hadn't changed since 1960, rich and poor students would have always attended similar-value schools.

But using current value-added, poor students attend lower-value uni's.

Teaching-oriented publics' deterioration explains 30% of collegiate regressivity.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

College quality varies widely: e.g. research-oriented publics have 2x the per-student revenue of teaching-oriented publics.

That money buys value. We measure colleges' "value-added": the degree to which they increase future wages.

Poor students' colleges' value has fallen.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

Number 1️⃣ is about changes in colleges' quality.

Rich students have always mostly attended private and research public universities. Poor students mostly go to teaching-oriented publics.

That's still true. But the teaching-oriented publics have deteriorated in value.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

We first plot the slope of the college-going premium by parental income over time. Positive numbers mean the premium is regressive.

Between 1920 and 1960, the premium was equal for the rich and poor. It's been getting more regressive since then.

Three factors explain the trend:

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

To identify and trace the causes of rising collegiate regressivity, we combine dozens of nationally-representative survey and admin datasets spanning 1900-2023.

The data include the parental income, college, major, and early-30s wages of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

In the early 1900s, the wage premium for going to college was the same for sons from both rich and poor families : +10 ranks (+15%) in the wage distribution.

Today, the wage premium has grown for the rich but sharply fallen for the poor. We call this "collegiate regressivity".

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · May 19

New study: The relative wage premium for going to college has halved for low-income Americans since 1960.

What is to blame? Rising selectivity? Tuition hikes? State disinvestment? We decompose changes in the premium since 1900 to find out.

🧵#EconTwitter nber.org/papers/w33797

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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Élio Nimier-David @elionimier.bsky.social · May 15

Why are wages in Paris or NYC higher than in other cities?

In a new WP with @paulinecarry.bsky.social & @bennykleinman.bsky.social, we decompose spatial disparities btw “location effects” and the local composition of workers and establishments.

New data on firm mobility + double-mover design.

🧵⬇️

NBER @nber.org · May 15

Data on firm relocations reveal that nearly all wage differences between cities stem from the spatial sorting of workers and firms; Location-specific factors explain only 2–5 percent, from Pauline Carry, Benny Kleinman, and Elio Nimier-David https://www.nber.org/papers/w33779

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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Jesse Rothstein @jrothst.bsky.social · Apr 9

We are hiring an education researcher to join the @capolicylab.bsky.social and @berkeleycshe.bsky.social teams. You'll work on projects using administrative data relating to California higher education. Here's more information: capolicylab.org/careers/rese...

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Reposted by Zach Bleemer

Anders Kjelsrud @anderskjelsrud.bsky.social · Jan 7

**New working paper**

How does the under-representation of females in Economics affect the career trajectory of female Ph.D. students?

Sahar Parsa and I look at this in a new working paper by exploring sabbatical leaves taken by female professors at top-50 US Econ departments.

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Zach Bleemer @zbleemer.bsky.social · Jan 4

I will discuss recent trends in meritocracy, access, and the allocation of US higher education on a livestreamed ASSA panel tomorrow (Sunday) at 8 am PST, 11 EST.

Livestream here: www.aeaweb.org/conference/l...

ASSA 2025 Live-Streamed Sessions

www.aeaweb.org

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