Upon high school graduation, students must decide whether to go to college and, if applying, what type of college to attend. While college students tend to earn more than those who forgo college altogether, their earnings typically depend on their major, academic ranking and the type of college they attended.
In this blog post, we examine the earnings gap between students attending the most competitive and the least competitive colleges. We ask whether this earnings gap can be explained by the corresponding gap in instructional expenditures―an input we view as important for students’ skill formation. More precisely, our hypothesis is that schools that invest more in their faculty, libraries and science labs offer a higher-quality education that translates into higher earnings for their students.