A continuous income-based grade gap decomposition on university course grades |
| |
Authors: | Shawn W Ulrick Kevin P Mongeon Michael P Giannetto |
| |
Institution: | 1. U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Washington, DC, USA;2. Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada;3. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA |
| |
Abstract: | The earnings premium for education, and higher education in particular, is well documented. This article examines the college achievement gap between students coming from positions of high and low socio-economic status. Other papers have also looked at this issue, often by employing, at least in part, an Oaxaca decomposition. Past papers artificially divided socio-economic status into binary groups of high and low, in order to employ the decomposition. Socio-economic status is innately a continuous variable. Therefore, we implement a continuous version of the Oaxaca decomposition. Higher socio-economic students are both slightly better prepared in terms of observable characteristics and have better returns to their characteristics than lower socio-economic students. Notable differences across results obtained from the binary and continuous decomposition methods are discussed. |
| |
Keywords: | Grade gap decomposition education socio-economic status income |
|
|