IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17284.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

College, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic disadvantage: policy lessons from the UK in 1960-2004

Author

Listed:
  • Ichino, Andrea
  • Rustichini, Aldo
  • Zanella, Giulio

Abstract

University access has greatly expanded during the past decades and further growth figures prominently in political agendas. We study possible consequences of historical and future expansions in a stochastic, general equilibrium Roy model where tertiary educational attainment is determined by cognitive ability and socioeconomic disadvantage. The enlargement of university access enacted in the UK following the 1963 Robbins Report provides an ideal case study to draw lessons for the future. We find that this expansion led to the selection into college of progressively less talented students from advantaged backgrounds and to a declining college wage premium across cohorts. Our structural estimates indicate that the implemented policy was unfit to reach high- ability, disadvantaged individuals as Robbins had instead advocated. We show that counterfactual meritocratic selection policies would have attained that goal and so would have also been progressive.

Suggested Citation

  • Ichino, Andrea & Rustichini, Aldo & Zanella, Giulio, 2022. "College, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic disadvantage: policy lessons from the UK in 1960-2004," CEPR Discussion Papers 17284, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17284
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17284
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17284. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.