Cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral returns to college quality

The choice lab seminar with Smriti Sharma on 15 December

Cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral returns to college quality


At this The Choice Lab seminar UNU-WIDER Research Fellow Smriti Sharma presented her work on cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral returns to college quality. The research exploits the variation in the admissions process across colleges of a leading Indian university to estimate the effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment using scores on standardized university exams; behavioral preferences such as risk preference, competitiveness, and overconfidence; and socioemotional traits using measures of Big Five personality.

Using a large dataset based on experiments and socioeconomic surveys, and applying a regression discontinuity design, the researchers find that enrolling in a selective college leads to modest improvements in females’ exam scores with no effect on males’ scores. Females in selective colleges become less overconfident and less risk averse as compared to their counterparts in the less selective colleges. Moreover, females from low income backgrounds experience greater changes in risk preferences. Males exposed to better college environments become less extrovert and less conscientious. We find higher attendance rates among females to be one of the likely channels explaining the gender differences in returns to better college and peer environment. These results are robust to a variety of robustness checks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in the literature to go beyond cognitive outcomes, to causally identify the returns to college quality on both behavioral and socioemotional traits.

Read more about the event at The Choice Lab.

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