Listen to your mother

 We don’t need no education

We don´t need no thought control

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

 

Despite Pink Floyd, it is pretty clear that education pays off. And programs targeted towards the earliest years have a higher return than those directed at later years.

But who knew that when you finally went to college, you should have listened to your mother?

We use administrative data from Chile from 1985 through 2011 to estimate the returns to postsecondary admission as a function of field of study, course requirements, selectivity, and student socioeconomic status. Our data link high school and college records to labor market earnings from federal tax forms. We exploit hundreds of regression discontinuities from the centralized, score-based admissions system to estimate the causal impacts of interest. Returns are positive and significant only among more-selective degrees. Returns are highly heterogeneous by field of study, with large returns in health, law and social science, as well as selective technology and business degrees. We find small to negative returns in arts, humanities and education degrees. We do not find evidence that vocational curriculum focus increases returns for less selective degrees. We do not find differential outcomes for students coming from low- versus high-socioeconomic backgrounds admitted to selective degrees.

The paper by Justine S. Hastings, Christopher A. Neilson and Seth D. Zimmerman

So it turns out you are better off listening to your mother or your dad’s best friend : go study medicine, science or law and forget those movie making dreams.

Maybe Benjamin should have paid more attention to that one word: “plastics”.

Or not.

Follow @franciscome  HT @M_Clem