Does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings?

Economics Economics Questions
1

Does anyone know of any good responses to the following 1990 study:

“Does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings?” by Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger

http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/273.pdf

I was only recently made aware of this study, which has been used in favor of compulsory school attendance laws and of the individual economic benefit of more schooling. The study looked at how a person’s birth month affected their years of schooling and the subsequent wages they earned. Individuals with earlier birth months tend to start school at a slightly older age, and therefore reach the legal dropout age sooner than those with later birth months. I haven’t studied the paper that closely, but from what I can tell, it claims that because of compulsory attendance laws, those with later birth months end up completing more schooling, are more likely to graduate high school, and make considerably more in wages.

The individual economic benefit of going to college is often cited to encourage just about everyone to go to college, and is used to support subsidizing higher education costs. (Like all the claims that college grads earn x% more than non grads.) I do think that higher education greatly benefits a lot of people, but before coming across this study, I thought that the supposed wage difference between grads and non-grads was exagerrated. I figured that a lot of the difference simply came from the fact that higher aptitude people are more likely to seek and complete higher education and they would be successful no matter what. I thought that the wage difference was not totally and solely caused by going to college. However, this study seems to question that notion because I believe they claim that there is still a proportional wage difference between those that are forced to stay in school longer because of a latter birth month, and those that are allowed to leave earlier because of an earlier birth month. We would assume that birth month has nothing to do with natural aptitude or drive, so it seems as though the key factor to the wage difference was in fact, how long someone was in school, independent of anything else.

This finding seems a little strange to me though because my gut instinct is that compulsory attendance laws should not be a net benefit. I would guess that there could be other explanations for the wage difference. For one, I think minimum wage laws could keep drop-outs from getting entry-level jobs where they could start gaining the experience necessary to later earn higher wages. I also think that the existence of public shools subsidizes the education and training of teenagers that might otherwise, in many cases, be done in some way through apprenticeships, on the job training, or private schools in a completely free market. The public schools limit the choices teenagers have and so when they drop out of public school they don’t have all the options they otherwise would have in order to gain experience, knowledge and skills to earn higher wages. There are probably lots of other explanations as well as the possibility that the researchers skewed data, made faulty assumptions, or made other errors.

I can see how people could cite this study as evidence of the importance of public education, compulsory attendance laws, and even of subsidizing higher education. However, even if the study was completely correct I would be still be against each of those things, because I don’t believe in forcing/taxing others to accomplish some educational or economic goal.

I am not very knowledgeable in this area, and again my question is whether anybody knows of any good articles that have responded or possibly refuted to the study above. If you don’t know of any articles, I’d still be interested in any enlightening comments you may have on the subject.

2

Shoes are good. Studies show that people without shoes have worse feet. Ever since government required people to wear shoes at all times, foot quality has improved. The free market cannot provide shoes.

3

It doesn’t require any response. It seems like common sense.

The question of whether kids learn more when going to a state school a little - or a lot - is different than whether the government schools should be abolished and the school market be made competitive.

4

egh sorry for the glib responses. We tend to handle things like this theoretically. If you want a study, try the CATO institute. They do a lot of good empirical research, even if it is theoretically flawed.

5

Actually, no. People that wear shoes have worse feet (their arches are lower, toes are bunched together, and feet are weak) and have a higher probability of getting plantar faciitis and achilles tendonitis. This is why the Tarahumara are injured so much less than American runners, but run so much more.

6

oh, sorry :slight_smile:

I actually wear sandals. Is that any good?

7

Yes, sandals are actually much better for the foot than shoes (over the long run).

8

woot. Take that girlfriend who doesn’t like the way my feet look!

9

I’m not necessarily looking for a quantitative study to refute their study, but at least some type of logical response to it and why it is flawed to use the results to argue for compulsory education laws and the subsidizing of higher education. Can theory not be used to point out flaws in quantitative studies and argue against conclusions made from those studies?

10

I haven’t read any direct refutations of that argument, but we can still apply some basic concepts to it.

  1. How is it morally right to force anyone to do something they don’t want to?

  2. How is it morally right to pay for these programs using other people’s money?

  3. Why should we trust government officials to decide what material/curriculum is appropriate for students?

Also, you might consider reading Jame’s Ostrowski’s book

11

NewLiberty:

"It doesn’t require any response. It seems like common sense.

The question of whether kids learn more when going to a state school a little - or a lot - is different than whether the government schools should be abolished and the school market be made competitive."

The findings of the study may appear to be “common sense” to most people, but I think it deals with an important issue and I think that the “common sense” doesn’t hold true in all cases. Also, you are correct that I’m not focusing on the issue of whether government schools should be abolished. I think that they should be, but right now I’m dealing with a more modest goal of trying to handle one study that people use to support compulsory education laws and subsidizing college.

I don’t think that this “common sense” is always applicable because I think it conceivable to have a situation where a school system is so bad, that the opportunity cost of staying in school (instead of leaving to earn a wage) would be greater than any future benefit the student would get from the schooling. In that case, the places with the lowest legal dropout age should probably have the highest average income.

How about we consider a thought experiment, where we suppose that we have an otherwise completely free market, except we take a test group and force them to all attend the same school until some arbitrary age. And lets suppose that this school is average or even above average (assuming we could determine some meaningful average). Would you expect this group of students to end up earning higher or lower wages on average than their other peers in the population? I think a lot would depend on the relative development of the total population they are taken from. If it was some theoretical free market from the past that was just starting an industrial revolution, and most people didn’t have schooling, then the people forced to go to school would probably end up doing much better than average. However, if it was an advanced free market economy where there is enough wealth in the economy to support everyone being able to get an education, and free market options abound, then I would assume that the group that is forced into one school would do worse than the average. I would think that schooling would not be the best choice for all of them and some of them would have done better choosing different options available to them if they had not been forced into one school.

Would you agree with that thought experiment? From what I understand, the original study that I mentioned would seem to disagree with it. So I guess I’m looking for a good explanation of why the original study can’t be applied today in the way many people use it.

It may be helpful to have even more of a back story here. I originally came across the study in question after getting in a discussion about this NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/weekinreview/16steinberg.html

It talks about how some people are trying to challenge the notion that we should be pushing everyone to go to college. There’s the high cost, and the fact that many people don’t ever graduate. So they say that some of the people most likely to fail should maybe be encouraged to go a different route, maybe a trade school. I mostly liked the article because I have generally thought that the push to have everyone go to college, or even have everyone go to traditional high school isn’t a good idea, and that it has some similarities to the artificial push to make everyone a home owner. Not everyone is ready to own a home, and not everyone is ready for college.

Proponents of sending more people to college tout the income differentials between college grads and non-grads. As I said initially, I’ve generally thought those numbers were exaggerated because people with higher aptitude are more prone to graduate college. However, the original study challenged that assumption I made. I think it is a subtle, but important distinction of what causes what. Does being a successful person lead someone to go to college or does going to college lead someone to be successful? Is the degree what gets people more money or is it just that people that are going to make money just happen to get more degrees. The study seems to find that income differential can be directly attributed to the education (even forced education) not to any bias among successful people to seek more education.

Now lets say you are talking to someone that assumes that we belong to a collective, and we have the collective duty to educate the young, so they think it is OK to tax people to pay for education. And then they pull out the study in question and start using utilitarian arguments that compulsory attendance laws and college tuition subsidies are good because they make people have higher wages. If you assume that it is not going to be productive to argue over basics, like whether the gov has the right to tax or force attendance, is there a good way to go about refuting their assertions? I think I’m probably looking for some utilitarian arguments with some theoretical backing that will counter those assertions and provide a better solution. Maybe like what I suggested initially, that perhaps the income differential comes from the minimum wage laws and if we really want to help kids get higher wages in the long run, instead of forcing them to stay in school and then subsidizing their college, we should focus on giving them immediate employment opportunities by repealing the minimum wage. I think that is the kind of argument I’m looking for, but I’m not sure that it is the best, or even a good way to handle it. I was hoping there was a good article that may have dealt with this already, so I could pass it on, but if not, the discussion here is helpful.

12

GetReal:

I haven’t read any direct refutations of that argument, but we can still apply some basic concepts to it.

  1. How is it morally right to force anyone to do something they don’t want to?

  2. How is it morally right to pay for these programs using other people’s money?

  3. Why should we trust government officials to decide what material/curriculum is appropriate for students?

Also, you might consider reading Jame’s Ostrowski’s book

I agree, I like those questions and I think they are very helpful. They really get at the heart of the matter. Thank you.

However, it would be great if I could also find some specific response to the study. I believe it is a relatively famous study, but a quick google search didn’t show anything popping out to me that would be helpful. I’ll have to look into it more later.

I think I’d probably agree with the book, I’ll try to get to it sometime. Do you know if it addresses this specific question?

13

**

ahh actually i didn’t say this.

14

Sorry, for some reason I’m having trouble quoting people, and was putting in the name manually. I’ve fixed it now.