SIO380: Does Which College You Go To Really Matter? (Part 2)

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 380. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Thanks so much for joining me. And this is part two. So make sure you've listened to the previous episode, part one. Part two with Dr. Elizabeth Deitch on how much the university you go to really makes a difference in your life. A ton more here. In part one, we talked mainly about that classic study that seems to be referenced in most articles that cover this. In part two today, goes way more into the surrounding research, more contemporary research, all kinds of stuff, looks at many different questions, adjacent questions, and there's a lot here, so I can't wait to get to it. Once again, go to patreon.com/seriouspod if you'd like to hear ad -free episodes, and you would have had this part two early, and maybe you did. Hi, patrons. Hopefully you enjoyed having this part too early. Please consider becoming a patron if you aren't already. All right, that said, let's get over to the interview. And are you here to tell us like, okay, here's the real new papers that tell us something? Or does just nobody have this?

0:01:16 Beth: Well, no, it's complicated. There is, first of all, this idea that it does have a really restricted sample of colleges. There are some things that we're trying to get a broader range of colleges, there's a piece that looked at, published in 1999, we're getting closer, that looks at using the National Longitudinal Study of High School Class of 1972, and they have high school and beyond surveys. And found that there was an effect of attending an elite university, but it is really, and this is something Tom said, and he was right, only between the very top and the very bottom, which is not usually what people are deciding. They divided their schools into six categories of top private, middle private, bottom private, and then top public, middle public, and bottom public. And going to your top private school was better than going to your bottom public school. Well, who's got those as their choices on their plate?

0:01:19 Thomas: Hmm, yeah. Yeah.

0:02:16 Thomas: Yeah, not much. I mean, the only people I can think of is really gifted students who don't have enough money to make the life change, travel change, whatever it might be, to go to. Like, they get into every school, but they're like, well, got to go the closest fucking public school because that's all we got. I mean, I could imagine that. I think that that might be useful to those people, maybe to know, like, it might be worth it in the long term if you can figure out a way to make that financially work.

0:02:16 Beth: Yeah.

0:02:43 Beth: They aren't the decisions that a parent or high school student is making. I want to go to Harvard or do I want go to the community college around the corner? Hmm, let's see, yeah,

0:02:50 Thomas: Yeah, it does. It does. It's like, OK, is Sac State versus, I don't know, UC Berkeley or something like that's what I would want to know. Something that's like a pretty good school versus, well, maybe I could stretch and get into this quite good school. You know, that would be that'd be a good decision. I don't know. Yeah. But that is interesting, though.

0:02:58 Beth: Right, right, right, yeah. They didn't find differences between like, you know, middle public and upper public, or middle public, or middle private, and there is another paper that I saw that just compared data on a lot of things, like class size and expenditures for student stuff, and said that public and private schools of similar ranks in like U.S. News and World Report kind of rankings really are about the same even though their costs are very different. Yeah, that just being public versus just being private is not necessarily a good indicator of quality. I

0:03:18 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm.

0:03:30 Thomas: But how do you feel about the quality of this study that you're referencing? I mean, you know, like how good's the data set? How good's, you know? Yeah,

0:03:42 Beth: Think it's good, but what it shows is that there's a difference between going to a super, super good school and going to the ones at the bottom. I'm just not sure how useful how useful that is for the real world. You know? Yeah.

0:03:49 Thomas: Of course. Yeah. Right. I just, you know, I also want to know like, but was it limited in the data they looked at? Is there some way, you know, like, yeah,

0:03:59 Beth: Well, they were looking at a more nationally representative sample, because they had people who went to all those kinds of schools. However, they did not have have a really huge data sample. And so there were some of those categories that didn't have a lot of people in them. Like, their top public category was quite small, only 22 people, as opposed to like 1,416 in the middle public category. So they could have used a bigger sample. That would have been nice.

0:04:05 Thomas: True. Yeah, but they controlled for all the like zip code, the income, all this stuff.

0:04:26 Beth: Yeah. Always, always, always. Yeah. Because we know women are going to earn less, black people are going to earn less and poor people are gonna earn less. That's just like given, right?

0:04:27 Thomas: Okay, cool. Yeah, but not only that, it's like the difference between the rich person who got into Harvard versus the poor person who got into Harvard, do we, do we see that effect, or is this saying that that effect doesn't exist? Control variable, okay.

0:04:44 Beth: Was just a control variable, I don't think they look at. Yeah, Meaning it's something that they're like, let's hold that constant. Ignoring that, already accounting for the differences that you would have due to your socioeconomic status, then is there anything on top of that that adds to, uh, that is added?

0:05:02 Thomas: Right. So that would answer, because hypothetically you'd have, okay, we've got a really wealthy person who got into a top school versus a really person who got into a bot, you know, quote-unquote bottom school, and we have a very poor person who got into top school, okay, so that would kind of answer that question.

0:05:02 Beth: Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Like Yeah. That's The the idea of controlling for it, of saying it's not something we're testing to see if it has an effect. We know it's going to have some effect, so we're going to try and hold that constant or take out the impacts of that and see what's left.

0:05:18 Thomas: Right, controlling for yeah, right. Okay, so the thing I'm thinking of is that the whole, like, well, getting into a good school benefits someone who came from a poor background versus someone who came from privileged background, yeah, right, but, but given that this study you're talking about now seems like a more representative data set, I was wondering if it, like, you know, if it says like, oh, actually that effect doesn't exist, or if it just didn't really look at it.

0:05:36 Beth: Yeah. Well, that study didn't show that, but the second Dale and Kruger paper did show that and some other studies that I've looked at do also show that too.

0:05:54 Beth: They didn't really look at it. But I have another one though that uses the Baccalaureate and Beyond data set for three cohorts of graduates. They are looking at graduates, people who graduated college in 1994, 1997, and 2003. And Did those same six categories of low, middle, high, and public, private. They're using selectivity, average SAT score. And, they found that when they looked at different types of students, that there were different things that mattered to later earnings for women versus men, and for black people versus white people. They were looking at the gender gap and the racial gap in earnings.

And for women, it really didn't seem to have to do with what kind of college you went to, but it very much had to do with what major you went to, and so a lot of the gender cap in earnings was that there were far fewer women in STEM majors, and they also tended to work fewer hours per week than men.

At black people versus the white people, they found that the most important things, well, family income did matter, of course, in your undergraduate GPA, a little bit on major, but for them, they did find differences between middle selective institutions and the bottom institutions, as well as highly selective in the bottom. So for black people, again, it seemed like going to a more selective school maybe helps provide something that you were missing otherwise. You know, and that was something Tom kept saying, not if you're white, not, if you are white, it doesn't matter if you

0:05:55 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Okay. Ooh, here we go.

0:06:08 Thomas: Hmm. Right.

0:07:29 Beth: Are white. And, and it definitely does seem to make a difference if you are a person of color coming from a low SES family. And SES is just socioeconomic status. I get tired of saying that out. I say that out all the time, SES. There's another study that looks at some of that same data with the 94, 97 and 2003 follow-up data that looks specifically at major and says, like, are the differences between different school characteristics more or less in different majors? And interestingly, they found the strongest differences were across business majors, that during business majors it was definitely significant differences all between top and middle or top and bottom or middle

0:07:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, ah, good. That's easier for me to say. Yeah Yeah and that

0:08:12 Beth: And bottom.

0:08:13 Thomas: Feels like that's gonna be the major that's the most bullshit connection -y thing, you know, and I should know I went to fucking business school.

0:08:16 Beth: Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the higher it gets, the higher your college gets in selectivity, the greater your earnings were in 2003. I think you mentioned something about sciences and stuff, and there was far less difference in the STEM fields between the different kinds of schools, because they kind of just care what you can do.

0:08:27 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:08:38 Thomas: We're still doing selectivity though, right? It's curious, like if we had, I don't know if this exists, but if there there was a really, really good school that just let everyone the fuck in, that would be like the worst school by this metric. They'd be like, wow, this one, you know? So like, that's kind of interesting. I don't know how much that impact that has in the real world, but, but I do think that what we should do is just let everybody get into college. Like we should, they should just let more people in, which would kind of change this calculation a little bit.

0:08:39 Beth: Uh -huh. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah right.

0:09:05 Thomas: Like I want some better ranking of schools. That's not just who do they accept, you know, like how good are their, their instructors, you know? How, yeah, that stuff.

0:09:14 Beth: Yes, yes. And can move on to a study of Fitzgerald and Burns, which was done by the National Center for Education Statistics. It's a really big study. They looked at a whole lot of things. They did look at different characteristics of institutions, and they still were using their dependent variable was still annual earnings. They were using the High School and Beyond Survey, which were people who were high school sophomores in 1980. And then they are looking at their graduation or their earnings in 1991. So let's see, 82, say if you do four-year degree, that's 86. So this would be five years out. And then they looked at four sets of predictor variables, and pre-collegiate education. So things like race, ethnicity, gender, family income, SES, grades and skills learned in high school and stuff. They looked at college characteristics, which included resources allocated to instruction. Admission selectivity is in there. Student to faculty ratio, whether the institution's mission is research or teaching. So they had more things of college. Then they also looked at whether you went to post-secondary education experiences. Oh no, this is post-secondary education experience. So your experiences in college.

So choice of major, classes taken, the difficulty and the diversity of classes, the amount of effort and ability expended on your studies, which they measured by GPA, participation in social activities and athletics and community activities, the timing of your attendance, like was it straight out of high school or did you take a gap year, your degree attainment, your postgraduate education.

And then they looked at labor factors, occupation, industry, your work experience, the number of employment and such to see which of these things mattered for how much you're earning five years later. And they did find differences and modeled those separately for men and women. They found that college characteristics as a whole, but this is not just selectivity, did account for a small but significant variance in men's earnings. So it

0:09:19 Thomas: Hmm. Ah.

0:11:15 Beth: Means ranging from two to three percent. So significance is based on not just the size of the effect, but also your sample size. Because the idea of significance is how likely does this effect generalize to a larger population? If you had the whole population, then it would be, oh, totally, everything's significant.

0:11:14 Thomas: What does small but significant mean? Okay. Oh, okay.

0:11:33 Thomas: Yeah. That's like, well, a million percent. Yeah,

0:11:35 Beth: Right, because obviously it generalizes. We tested the whole populace. You know, when you have five people, then it's got to be a huge effect before you can say, yeah, no, this holds for everyone. So the larger your sample size, the smaller effect that could be significant. Again. So two or 3%, you know, that's not that much, but they found actually that higher education experiences, the things you did in college or major, all of that accounted for substantially more. So about 12% of the variance in... Oh, when we talk about variance, what we're talking about is explaining sort of why some people are earning more than others. You know, the variation,

0:11:36 Thomas: Yeah. Gotcha.

0:12:12 Thomas: Yeah mm

0:12:13 Beth: The fact that we have people earning a lot and people earning little. And if if we have some way of totally explaining who's going to earn a lot and who's going to learn a little, then we are explaining 100% of the variance. You know, we can figure out that you're going to be number one, you're gonna be number two, number three. Of course we're never doing that in human things. And so to say we're explaining two to 3% of the variance, it's like, okay, two to three percent of the difference in who's earning high and who is earning low is due to the college characteristics. It's small, but it is, you know, again, so relatively right,

0:12:25 Thomas: -hmm. Right. Yeah but importantly, I would imagine people might misinterpret that of like, oh, you're gonna make two to three percent more. And it's like, no, it's not that. It's like, of the the difference, you're explaining two or three percent. Okay.

0:12:51 Beth: Right, right. Well, and they did kind of take this to some numbers, like for that it can still kind of be important for men. Attending a college whose characteristics are one standard deviation above average was estimated to be worth an additional $2,311 in annual earnings, or this an 8.1% increase over the average, because it sort of adds up over time. And so for women, the comparable increment was $3,746. And so, you know, even though it looks like a small percentage, it can actually translate to something substantial over the five years they're looking at.

So which characteristics mattered, though, differed for men and women. For men, weirdly, on this one, attending a selective versus non -selective institution mattered. And this was measured by the Cooperative International Research Project CERF ratings on colleges and universities. Men also benefited from attending institutions with higher per capita spending.

So if you went to a more selective school, and they do have a much broader range of schools here, the men who went to more selective school and had more per capita spendings on instruction made more money, holding everything else constant. But for women, there was a different selectivity measure was associated with higher earnings, and that was just the straight -up ratio of applicants to admissions. Admissions, attending a selective liberal arts college and attending an institution located in the mid-Atlantic region or New England had a significant positive effect on women's earnings.

0:12:54 Thomas: Yeah. What?

0:14:20 Thomas: Weird.

0:14:20 Beth: I know, I wish they had asked about single gender schools because I'm like, okay, liberal arts college in the Northeast, are you going to Vassar and Bremer and, you know, are these the Seven Sisters Colleges, which certainly then were still all female and that might have something on there, because, yeah, women who went to liberal arts colleges in the Northeast made a lot more money.

0:14:21 Thomas: Interesting.

0:14:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:43 Beth: That's just like weird. So, you know, these things are just kind of all over the place by how do you want to measure selectivity? What population you want to look at? What characteristics you want to look at? And the ones that do find differences, they're often not very large. And so I do think that idea of selectivity is, you kind of bullshit, like Tom was saying.

0:14:49 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

0:15:09 Beth: Oh, I did want to do one more, which was the one that took the original Dale and Kruger set. Yeah, this was, and this is recent. This is a 2022 paper that used that same data that Dale and Kruger did. I guess it was still people who went to college way back, but they didn't restrict their sample only to full-time workers. And so they wanted to look at gender effects and they also wanted to look not just at earnings, trainings, but at other outcomes like labor force participation, your family formation, whether you go on to get an advanced degree, so there's still this problem that this data set only includes fairly selective colleges because it's that same college and beyond Right.

0:15:24 Thomas: Oh. Hmm. And It's super old. Yeah.

0:15:49 Beth: But the idea is that there are different mechanisms that school quality quality might affect your career and family. You may have different you choices between should I stay at work or should I stay home and take care of the kids, depending on how much you're likely to make. You know, the idea of who's an attractive spouse may differ. You know? High career ambition may still not be attractive for some men and their wives. It may be that there's a lot of different things that school quality and selectivity can affect that aren't directly your earnings. And they did find that going to an elite college for women was associated with a higher likelihood of getting an advanced degree, which is not surprising. You know, the more selective the school you go to, the more you're like into school. It was associated with a lower likelihood of getting married. Yeah, so the more selective the school you went to.

0:16:43 Thomas: That's Right. The Woke are killing the family.

0:16:46 Beth: Right, right, right. And that's also greater participation in the labor market. So women who went to more selective colleges just worked more. And that was the main source of their income effect of selective colleges. They were also more likely to have a more educated spouse. Of course, being married and having children was just associated with lower personal earnings in general. There were some interesting interactions that the greatest benefit of school selectivity was for women who are married or have children. So basically, basically, the more selective the school, the less likely you are to get married. But if you do get married, then a more selective school is also associated with higher earnings. Yeah.

So it shows that there's a lot of heterogeneous effects among women, you know, so saying talking about the average effect may just be pointless, because a lot of this stuff, especially for women, seems to depend on life choices and career and family choices, and timing of your marriage and children and stuff like that. And so just saying, oh, here's the average woman, you know, doesn't necessarily give us useful information.

But I thought that was interesting, though, that the main way going to an elite school affects women's earnings is because it makes them less likely to get married and have children. Yeah, you're

0:16:46 Thomas: Yeah. Sure, yeah. Yeah.

0:18:06 Beth: Right. This is like one of those, it's going to be like, oh the woke are ruining everything. No,

0:18:06 Thomas: And It's not the way around, as in, people who would have chosen to go to those schools wouldn't have been the kind of people who'd want to get married super young.

0:18:15 Beth: No, because these people actually used Dale and Kruger's self -revelation method, the idea of looking at where people applied to pull that out. But then they're like, we're not going to restrict just to the full -time workers. So we're going to look at everybody, including the people who say are only working part -time because they have kids or stopped working while they have kids or whatever, will also be in our data set. And when they did that, even aside from your your self -revelation stuff, your ambitions or whatever are being shown by your application behavior, still going to a higher selectivity school was associated with greater participation in the labor market. And so that was the main way in which it boosted women's earnings, made them more likely to go and get an advanced degree and spend more time working. Yeah. So that's all kind of just interesting stuff with using your dependent variable as earnings? How much money do you make? That's obviously not the most important thing. And one of the things that Tom kept emphasizing in the Dear Old Dads episode was that the best school is the one you graduate from.

0:18:22 Thomas: Ah. Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm, mm. Mm hmm. Interesting.

0:19:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:21 Beth: Yeah. And so there are several studies that look at whether or not you're more or less likely to graduate depending on how selective your school is. So there's one, one that I looked at that is specifically looking at public institutions, only public institutions, and they found that there was a higher probability of completing a bachelor's degree if you went to a more selective school. And this is over a much larger range, so it's not just the tippy tops, but they found a 100 point increase in the average SAT for admitted students was associated with a 13 percentage point higher probability of completing your bachelor's degree, controlling for all of the other things. Attendance at a selective, very selective public college was associated with a 24% increase over the not selective ones of earning a bachelor's degree.

0:20:16 Thomas: Right.

0:20:16 Beth: Yeah. And so some of that is like, well, how does that happen?

0:20:19 Thomas: Well, hold on. Just to clarify, I think the that point Tom's making though is like, you know, the economic outcomes of graduating versus not, right? So right now you're describing the chances of graduating dependent on which school you choose and all that

0:20:24 Beth: Yeah. Yeah. Do people who go to more selective schools, are they more likely to graduate? Graduate, no.

0:20:33 Thomas: Right. Is, do we have later on the, okay, and therefore what is graduating versus is not graduating due to your life and your income.

0:20:43 Beth: There is no study that has all the variables. Yeah. And, and well, and it's also, again, what data set are you going to use, there's like these five or six great big educational data sets and which ones people choose. No.

0:20:44 Thomas: Okay. Oh, all right. They're so old. Like, how do we not have new good ones? Like, how do we not get more recent good data sets? Like, just nobody cares? I don't understand.

0:21:03 Beth: We are, um, did the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1997, so that was people born between 1980 and 1984. And then they were first surveyed in 1997 when they, they were between the ages of 12 and 16. And then they did follow-up surveys on an annual basis thereafter until 2010, when they were 26 to 30 years old. So at an age when most of them, yeah, yeah.

0:21:13 Thomas: Okay. All right. Now we're getting toward my life, my

0:21:29 Beth: Right, right. And that was this paper here that found those who went to more selective institutions were more likely to graduate. So it had a positive effect on your probability of graduation.

0:21:29 Thomas: Demographic.

0:21:38 Thomas: Oh, okay. We're more likely. Okay. Well, okay, that's interesting now. If, like, if we're under the theory that the best college is one you graduate from, Then I guess now we're saying, well, then go to a better school because, or go to more selective school because that will increase your chances of graduation, essentially.

0:21:54 Beth: Yeah. But it doesn't mean that it's necessarily low at other institutions, but it is, it is. Tom was right on his about two -thirds graduate overall, of students graduate. About a third of students never finish. And they didn't fully get into, you know, it's in the directions for future research. Well, how does this work? And that the idea that maybe being a more selective college lets you attract better teachers. Maybe you can deliver more individual attention. Maybe Maybe you get enough classes and seats to graduate in a timely fashion. There's also a lot of consideration of peer groups and people's just sort of theorizing mentally. But I have not been able to find anything. Granted, haven't fully looked on this one. This was a thread I hadn't had time to follow. If anybody's looked into things of peer group, like fraternities and sororities and other things, too, might be a,

0:21:56 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that

0:22:45 Beth: Yeah, yeah. Which I just didn't have time.

0:22:45 Thomas: Would be very interesting. Yeah. How has nobody studied? Oh, okay. We don't know. Maybe follow up later.

0:22:51 Beth: Yeah, I can look and follow up. I just, you know, there's only so much I could.

0:22:51 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. No, no. You looked at so much. No, this was not at all a criticism. Yeah. I forgot. For a second, I took you to say nobody had done that. I misunderstood.

0:23:00 Beth: No, no, I have not. I have Not found it. It has not been in these studies that we're looking at selectivity effects. They haven't Put it together with the selectivity stuff. And so mostly, since that was the question of is there a difference between the highly selective and somewhat less selective schools, that was the stuff I focused on. But you do have to acknowledge that a lot of your learning and your orientation towards your schoolwork happens outside the classroom. And being surrounded with high ability peers or ambitious peers may have an influence on your likelihood of finishing, and much time you spend studying, and all those kind of things are very influenced by your peer group. And so I can see that being a mechanism by which it could increase your chances of graduation. But they did not look at the mechanisms in this. Again, they're looking at these huge data sets that already exist. And the idea of like, well, then let's go back and look at it. Well, if they don't have the data, they don't have the data.

0:23:01 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Mm hmm. Hmm. Yeah, yeah. Mm.

0:23:59 Beth: You know, you've got what they ask. Who were your friends in college, unfortunately, wasn't a question. So They find that the more selective schools have a higher rate of degree completion, but but they don't have data to determine the mechanism. There's another study I found that looked at the degree completion effect, looking at race and gender effects, and they also included Dale and Kruger's self-revelation model idea for unobservables. This was from the class of 1992 National Education Longitudinal Study. They used Barron's rankings for selectivity of most and highly selective, very selective, just selective and non-selective. They do show that college completion rates are lower for minorities than whites, that's a consistent finding, and slightly higher for women than men, that is another consistent finding. But they found that overall, a student who first enrolls in a selective institution is 7% more likely to complete than a student who first enroll in a non-selective institution, again, top to bottom there. But when they divided these out, though, they found that it held for white people and for African-Americans and Hispanics, both much larger effect for African Americans and Hispanics.

0:24:04 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:25:20 Thomas: And sorry, I've lost track. What effect is this? Oh,

0:25:23 Beth: Selective schools more likely to get the degree, although it had an effect for everyone, a highly selective school made them more likely to get the degree, it had a big effect for black people and Hispancs. They did not find a difference in gender in this one, other than the fact that women are just more likely to graduate in general, but they didn't find an effect of the selectivity of the institution. Men and women seem to have that same impact, that it makes you a little more likely to graduate. It does seem that going to a good school versus a bad school may be some of like being with the high-achieving people versus being with the slackers, you know? Know?

0:26:02 Thomas: And again, selective versus non selective. Right.

0:26:05 Beth: Right. Then it does come down to whether you graduate. It's making a difference on whether you undergraduate, You know? And so we could kind of infer what that might do for earnings later on, but it is that intermediate step that Tom was emphasizing, and that was not accounted for at all because they weren't even restricting just to graduates in the studies that everyone keeps citing. Very interesting little piece that I found then that the grads of elite schools actually perform better at work. They did global teams that were on a business consulting project. I think this was an experimental, or it might have been real world, of like 29 ,000 students in global virtual teams as they worked on an international business

0:26:05 Thomas: Yeah mm hmm. Sure yeah. Yeah. Ooh. Hmm. How,

0:26:47 Beth: Consulting project. They came from 79 countries, 294 universities, and they found that for every increase, they're looking at these web -o -metrics global university ratings because this one is doing global universities, not just the US, which has 20 ,000 positions. And they found that for every increase in a thousand positions, overall performance improved only nominally by 1 .9%. If you go from top to bottom, then yeah, you get more of a difference in performance.

0:27:21 Thomas: So how was the performance evaluated?

0:27:23 Beth: Yeah, I believe this was an experimental one. And so they had like sort of, how did you perform in in this kind of business game. Yeah, yeah. Because they also then looked at how you got along with other people and stuff. And they found that the people from the elite schools were more likely to focus on instrumental tasks and less on the interpersonal relationships. They had fewer non -instrumental conversations. So they didn't really talk to people about their lives. Lives. And they showed less commitment and identification with their teams. So it seems like that

0:27:26 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that, yeah. Interesting. Huh.

0:27:59 Thomas: Wow.

0:27:59 Beth: They perform maybe a teeny bit better, but they also might not be the world's best team players. There's one that's an audit study. I love audit studies. Audit studies are the kind of things they first were done to look for housing discrimination in the 60s and 70s, where you would send matched applicants to inquire about an apartment for rent. And the only thing that was different between them was black or white. They otherwise had sort of the same job, kind of the same income. Basically, everything's the same. And lo and behold, a lot of times when the black people came, the place was already rented.

0:28:04 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah...

0:28:37 Beth: We still do those some in person, but we also now with everything on the internet can do a lot of paper studies of audit studies. This is one where he created matched candidate pairs that differed by race and by going to a selective versus a non -selective school.

0:28:56 Thomas: Are these fake people or...?

0:28:58 Beth: Yes, these are what we call paper people. And so they sent resumes and cover letters. And they were, depending on where you were, it was whether you went to Harvard versus University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the West, it it was whether they went for Stanford versus University of California, Riverside. And Then I guess Midwest South was Duke versus University North Carolina. And so there would be these different candidates that differed only by their race, gender, and whether they went to an elite school or not. And every job of a thousand jobs, they sent out resumes, resumes, cover letters to a thousand advertised jobs, and each job got two different resumes, and they would be randomized so which one was the white one and which was the black one, or which was the high status, low status.

They all got an equal number of chances overall, you know, so like one of them might gotten, might have gotten a resume from a white male who went to a high elite school, school, and then a black male who went to an elite school, or a black man who went to an elite school and a black men who went to a non-elite school, you know. And so you can hold everything constant except for the race and the school selectivity. And they didn't really find a lot of differences by gender, but the differences by race were very interesting in who gets a callback. That was their measure, was who got called back. Who got a callback, like, "We'd like to have an interview." They definitely found an effect of college selectivity, that

0:29:00 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Really?

0:30:31 Beth: People who had a higher, more selective college were more likely to get the callback. Now, do remember, these are publicly advertised jobs, so maybe they're less likely to getting a Harvard grad applying. Then, know, that's not how Harvard grads get their jobs, just with cold -setting resumes. They did find definitely an impact. But what I found fascinating was that there was difference by race for sure. Within the categories of a highly selective school, black people were less likely to get the callback than white people. Withinthe categories of less selective school black people less likely to get the call back, the white people.

0:30:47 Thomas: Sure, yeah.

0:31:09 Thomas: So you're saying now we're controlling for the school part and just the pure racism is probably happening. Yeah. Gotcha.

0:31:15 Beth: So, Yes, indeed. And that's what I love about audit studies, because, you now, although there were different pairings sent to the different jobs, there's a thousand jobs. And so everyone gets to have black with each qualification and white with each qualification several many times. And, so you have like the black Harvard grads and the white Harvard grad that have totally equivalent credentials, good good cover letters, resumes, all of it. The only difference is black versus white. So yeah. What else can be?

0:31:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Mm -mm. Well, you see, I black pieces of paper probably didn't work as hard, though, Beth.

0:31:48 Beth: Yeah. I mean, like I said, that's what I love about audit studies. Cause it's like, that'S the only freaking difference.

0:31:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what I cited forever around Hillary and Trump. I mean for as much as people swore their decision to hate Hillary with this weird and fierce intense hate that they didn't have for any other politician. Was That just based on purely her reputation, what she did. But it's like, no, you think that's, what it's based on. But when we do these studies, the way I can't remember specifically what the one I referenced was, but the, the long and the short of it was there's always a reason. They also asked people why they made the decision they did, like in the hiring or the whatever. And there's always a reason.

0:32:24 Thomas: They're like, oh, this person, they didn't have enough experience. And it's like, yeah, okay. But this person you're like – well, they had the experience. They didn't enough good education. And they would just shift and find the justification after the fact. That's the important part. They would always have a reason because you could look at the resume and find something wrong with it. But you're only doing that when you want to do that.

0:32:24 Beth: Oh, right. Right. Right, right, right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean that's can be implicit bias, you know, that, that it can be that there's just no, no way, we've all grown up in a racist society and there's maybe no way that that can avoid influencing your perceptions. Of the best way to manage those things is to have it set up so you don't know. So decision makers don't, you know, like can those, because also they had black sounding names. So, you Know, do they take the names off of it? You know, have someone else do that before the decision maker gets the resume and you see it with the, that sort of information removed.

0:32:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yep. There's also issues with that approach, because due to structural racism, there will be more, quote unquote, qualified white applicants. So if you, you just look at it purely blind, as they say, then it would be, you would reinforce the structural racism that already exists, which is why you do need things like,

0:33:16 Beth: Right, right, yeah.

0:33:33 Beth: Well, absent affirmative action, the idea that if people are making decisions just based on qualifications and experience, then that idea of not being able to see who it is could be helpful.

0:33:47 Beth: I mean, I think of it like, I statistics classes, and I would, on exams, I would make the first page of the statistics exam very objective things, Like I would have little sample studies and go, what would be the correct statistic to use? And it was a matching thing. You had to pick those. So that's objective. You're right or wrong. Because a lot of the rest of the test then is going to be things where students, they write bullshit and you can't tell if they understand or not. Because a Lot of Statistics is can you interpret what you've got? And you're like, I don't know. Maybe they get it. Maybe they're just bullshitting. I don't know. But after I graded that first page, I would flip that back. And so then all of my other grading was without knowing whose test it was. Us. And I would find myself when I'm trying to decide if this answer here is worthy of half credit, maybe, or is it just total bullshit? I really wanted to look. I

0:33:42 Thomas: You Yeah.

0:34:37 Beth: Really want to know. And then I'd say, well, why do I want to note? Because I'm going to decide that if it's a student who seems like a slacker in class, I'm gonna give them less benefit of the doubt than if it is a student who seems alert and engaged in class. So I would resist it, go, nope, not gonna do it, because you should grade the answer just on the basis of the answer here. But that urge in me to go, I can interpret it better if I know who it is, that's the bias, you know?

0:34:45 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:35:04 Beth: And I know it's there and I know what I'm doing, and I still have an urge to do it. The only way to avoid doing it is just make it so I can't tell whose paper it is when I'm grading the more subjective stuff. Because, yeah, obviously these people, when they decide who to call back for a job, they're not really thinking, "Oh, I'm being racist when I call this white person for an interview," you know, they've got a whole bunch of resumes, not just the ones sent by this guy, and they just kind of pick who they like, and we tend to like people like us.

0:35:24 Thomas: Sure.

0:35:35 Thomas: Well, and our vision, our, our idea of what makes a good candidate, what makes us successful person is colored by the world we live in where you're like, well, yeah, that, that those credentials are what I associate with quality when that might not actually be the case. This study though, obviously, obviously, I'm sure it showed the racism, the sexism, the, all that we, we suspected for our purposes of college stuff, selectivity and all that, you're saying pretty strong effects on this one?

0:35:41 Beth: Right. Yeah.

0:36:00 Beth: Yeah, definitely, of who got called back. There were pretty strong effects on that of, um, of like, let's see, 8% for the less selective school versus 15% for the more selective school. That was just overall.

0:36:03 Thomas: Interesting.

0:36:15 Thomas: That's pretty significant. It's hard to believe that wouldn't do something in the real world, right? Who knows?

0:36:15 Beth: Yeah. I mean, granted, this is just, did you get called back for an interview? And I think this person was mostly interested in race effects too, but does have the side effect of showing that it did have an impact for everyone. However, interestingly, the black people were called back for jobs that tended to pay lower salaries because they looked at which ones had an advertised salary range. And they found that, the black, yeah, candidates still lagged behind the white candidates in employer responses. And when black candidates received responses, they were for jobs with lower listed salaries and they were less often for the managerial kind of jobs.

And so they tended to get called back for lower status jobs for lower pay. They not only were less likely to get callback altogether, but when you get the idea of does it translate to earnings, the jobs they did get called back for were the lower paying jobs.

It seemed that like a black person who had a Harvard degree got about the same callbacks as a white person who had the low status degree, in terms of like how the people looked at you when you sent the resume, having that super elite degree just got you up to, well, you're as good as the average white guy from baseline.

0:36:23 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Did, was the school effect bigger or smaller depending on grace? Because that might make sense. Like if you set everything else equal, the effect of callbacks for black people versus white people

0:37:49 Beth: For white people, it was like 17 % to 11%. And for black people, that was 12%, 5%. So it really is about the same amount of difference. Race. Well, it's a percentage of callbacks they got from the resumes. So not

0:37:50 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, Okay, Yeah, in percentage points, I guess, but Yeah, Yeah, So I'm saying the, so in percentage points, as in like a Seven, six, whatever that was, but that's, I mean, if you looked at it in proportion, it's a little bit different, right? So like it's just a math thing.

0:38:14 Beth: Significantly though. Not Not significantly though. It's not a significant interaction.

0:38:15 Thomas: Yeah. Gotcha.

0:38:18 Beth: Those are separate effects. There is the effect of college selectivity, and then there's the effect of race, and they appear to not interact. Selective is better than non -selective when people are evaluating your resume, but black people are lower even within those categories.

0:38:19 Thomas: Yeah, Interesting.

0:38:35 Thomas: Suspicion was going to be that like maybe it would have a better effect, like the better school would have a bigger effect for black people just because like maybe it helps more to overcome some, some biases, maybe, but no, okay, it's pretty, pretty consistent, that's interesting, yeah. Is

0:38:39 Beth: Right. Nope. Interactions were not significant. Yeah. Yeah And so, yeah, the black from elite institutions got callbacks 12.9% of the time, versus the white people from elite institutions, 17.5% of the time. And the black people from elite institutions got a little bit higher than the white people from the less selective institutions, that's not a significant difference. It was 11.4% for white people going to less selective institutions, and 12.9% for the black people going into the elite institutions. So that's where, say, black people from the elite institutions just got a little bit higher than the white people from non-elite institutions.

0:39:23 Beth: Yeah, so still the racism. Also the idea about what rankings measure and what are good outcomes from college. The idea of not just money, everything's just about money and jobs, money and job, money and Jobs. So I have some things that look into like job satisfaction and well -being, your learning, your engagement with your job, you other ways of measuring the value of going to college, because it shouldn't just be vocational school. I hate that we're looking at it that way. And I think part of it is because of how much it costs, that

0:39:34 Thomas: There, Yeah. Hmm. Sure. Yeah. Yeah,

0:39:55 Beth: Now it's like, you've got to see, is it worth the cost? College is a lot more than just getting a credential. It's a life experience that for many people is really formative. When did you stop being all right -wingy?

0:39:56 Thomas: Especially nowadays. Uh definitely partially through college, but actually that's more slightly after college, um, because of the the atheist movement.

0:40:14 Beth: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fine. That's fine, Yeah. Because I've heard from a lot of students who they did not have a lot of interactions with other people who weren't like them until they got to college

0:40:18 Thomas: Yeah I will say when it comes to things like, implicit you inherited homophobia, 100% college just completely rid me of that due to like actually being around gay people. And that definitely turned me more liberal than I was. I think I went like, I probably got me from conservative to libertarian, which, you Know, I think is actually an improvement, but is not like a super super big one. And, and yeah, that exposure was, huge. Was Like actually seeing, meeting those people. That is, that Now, is that something that would necessarily go with selectivity of university?

0:40:29 Beth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:47 Beth: No.

0:40:59 Beth: Yes.

0:40:59 Thomas: You know, like, yeah, it'd almost go the opposite or you would think. Yeah. Yeah. Which

0:41:01 Beth: Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. Highly selective institutions are going generally less diverse, especially given recent Supreme Court decisions. You And that's the thing, that's a value that may not have economic payback. Obviously, it could if it makes you better able to work with diverse groups of people or things like that. But I feel like it's a positive outcome in and of itself, you know, I think college should help us think about like historical and ethical issues and philosophical issues and the kinds of things that make people good citizens, not just good workers, you know, that the sort of broad liberal arts education, you you actually have to learn things in various fields that you may not have an immediate economic return for, like that literature class or that philosophy class. But I feel like they give people the kind of perspective and grounding in diversity of reality, you knows, that makes them better able to participate in our modern life.

0:41:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Mm -hmm. Yeah mm -hmm

0:42:03 Beth: And we just don't seem to care about that when we're looking at what are the outcomes comes of college. It's always like, how much money did you make? What kind of job did you get?

0:42:03 Thomas: Yeah. Mean, It's so fucking expensive now. It's hard to really blame people, you know. But yeah, I see what you mean, for sure. And it's interesting that those things cut both ways. You might be like, well, maybe this more selective school is good for these reasons, but bad for these regions, you you know, but,

0:42:15 Beth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Okay. So I would say though, a little sum up on the college selectivity thing is,

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah. Some, some, some up, let's get some broad strokes.

0:42:32 Beth: That it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference for well-educated wealthy white men. More selective schools do seem to be associated with women and working more, less likely to get married and do the family thing, more likely to go on and get a graduate degree and work some. And it does definitely seem to be something that can kind of compensate for people who are less likely to have the kind of high SES connections that get you like references for internships and networks with other people in your field and leaves on initial jobs and stuff. So of color and people who are from lower socioeconomic status and people whose parents are not very educated, they all seem to get more of a boost for going to an elite college. A couple things found some difference between middle and bottom, but it does seem to be usually a difference between top and bottom, and they're measuring that largely via selectivity, well.

0:43:29 Thomas: And what do you think are the holes in our knowledge here? I mean, where, where are the places where it's like, maybe someone was claiming X, but like, actually we don't really, based on the limitations of the data sets, all that stuff, where do you think we were left with that? Yeah.

0:43:43 Beth: I think there's just, it's impossible to get all the variables in one study. And I think there's so many other variables in there that are not measurable. And honestly, that takes us back to the very first papers, that that was what they were trying to show, is that there's stuff that you don't have numbers on. There does seem to be an effect of kind of fit, you know, and it's whether you go to a college that engages you, and is really, if I had more time, where I would, I would like to go to the stuff on engagement on student engagement

0:43:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:44:17 Thomas: That would be yeah, maybe time for another, uh, another part for sure, yeah

0:44:18 Beth: Yeah yeah yeah, and that, that I find very much more interesting than the rankings. I also have some things that get into like exactly how the U.S. News and World Report rankings are done and how it's kind of bullshit and subjective and those are the things that we're using

0:44:32 Thomas: Right, yeah of course I was that's funny, I was actually listening for if any of the studies were going to use them as their, the ranking because that's what I remember like everybody referring to, it's yeah and

0:44:35 Beth: Yeah yeah yeah some of them did that as like a double check, like, okay, we'll look at this thing too, and they really didn't find anything different than they found just using selectivity, because a lot of the things are kind of redundant in that. One, but there's... there's like 10 different things and they're weighted differently, and the weights are very arbitrary. Some of them are very much not independent of each other, so some things are getting like, like, double counted, basically.

0:45:03 Thomas: Free to decline, but like, if you were to try, I don't know, give some tangible parent advice on this. It sounds like maybe don't worry so much about the selectivity, quality of the school. Maybe if it was me, I would say worry about the fucking cost since being saddled with massive debt is such a big problem.

0:45:17 Beth: Yes. Exactly what I was going to say, because even the effects that we find are not massive. They are fairly small. And given the difference in tuition between, you know, like your average state school and your average private school, it probably isn't worth it. However, some, if you have a lot of financial aid for the expensive school, sure. But some of the stuff looking into other life outcomes, things like well -being and job satisfactional, do find that huge amounts of debt are a negative pull on people. They lower well -being, lower life satisfaction, lower physical health, all of it. Just the huge amount of debt is negative. I would not go into massive amounts of debt just to get that extra super elite school. I don't think it's worth it unless you're someone who would really be getting access to networks that you otherwise do not have and you get plenty of financial aid to do it.

0:45:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah right.

0:46:13 Thomas: Yeah if you were someone who your choices was a bottom school or top top school, which seems pretty rare. Maybe then it's worth it, but yeah. Okay, cool. Well, this is, I mean, I think Tom largely vindicated and yeah.

0:46:17 Beth: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Of yeah, yeah, and I mean, also if you're just if you're not connected to you good job networks and education networks because your family is not rich and educated and white, then the school can help make up for that.

0:46:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. All right. Well, Beth Dyche, thanks so much for doing the work. Sounds like we could have plenty of follow-ups and if you'd like to give anybody a place to find more of you, socials, anything, you want to throw out any plugs oh

0:46:35 Beth: No.

0:46:50 Beth: Not really, I quit teaching because academia at a public university got to be untenable, um.

0:46:56 Thomas: That's too bad.

0:46:57 Beth: Yeah. Well, yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't do a shit job and to do the kind of job I could be proud of I was working like 80, 90 hours a week. Yeah. Because they just cut resources cut resources and yeah. Yeah.

0:46:57 Thomas: Oh. Yeah, yeah. That's a story I've heard a lot, I'd be you know talk about topics, uh, for another time. I, I have always wondered, uh, where the hell is all, where's all the money going, like, that would be an interesting thing if there's a study on it, where I know college has increased by a billion percent for us and I don't know where that money is going because it's not going to faculty, it seems like that, so top topic for another time, right?

0:47:28 Beth: Was teaching at University of New Orleans, which is a public institution. And so a lot of the problem there is in reduced government funding. We've decided that public higher education is not something we wish to contribute to anymore.

0:47:37 Thomas: Right. Right. Well. Uh, so much, uh, groups, no, anything you want to plug, nothing, no events, no Any, there

0:47:46 Beth: Don't know. Well there's NOSHA, our New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, which Yeah, which I am on the board word for and we do things, you know, like heathens happy hours and our dinner club and we have monthly programs and we have a band book club. Yeah, we're reading some of the things that

0:47:50 Thomas: You Go.

0:48:01 Thomas: You Got A Lot a Lot More to choose From these days, huh?

0:48:04 Beth: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:48:06 Thomas: No.

0:48:06 Beth: So that's at nosha.info, N-O-S -H -A. And that can connect you with all of our things that we do. So if you're in the New Orleans area, yeah meet up with us.

0:48:09 Thomas: Shit Dot info Thanks Again, so much for the very comprehensive deep dive and maybe we'll speak again sometime on the Show.

0:48:20 Beth: Yeah.