The Long-Term Effects of Career Guidance in High School: Evidence

The schools were selected to participate in the experiment based on a priority index computed from the size of the school, the number of low-income families in the school, and the number of other schools in the district. [...] Are these effects driven by a change in the probability to apply to a four-year college or by a change in the probability to be selected into a four-year college? To answer this question, I estimate the impact of the career guidance program on the fraction of students who aspire to pursue a four-year college degree when asked during the survey conducted at 10. [...] Assuming the rise in income is solely driven by the 0.19-year increase in the length of post-secondary education observed in Table II, it can be inferred that the returns to an additional year of schooling for the marginal students are roughly 36 percent, which is much higher than the returns to schooling observed in the literature (Oreopoulos and Petronijevic (2013)). [...] Do the students induced to enroll in a four-year college by the financial aid interven- 19 tion have the same characteristics as the students induced to enroll by the career guidance program? Appendix Table A8 presents an estimation of the baseline characteristics of the students induced to enroll in four-year college by each intervention.14 The table suggests that students induced to enroll by th. [...] µP is the mean of the characteristic in the full population, µA is the mean of the characteristic for students from the control group who enrolled (the always-takers), and µN is the mean of the characteristic for students from the treated group who did not enroll (the never-takers).