UCLA

There are numerous widely recognized advantages to pursuing post-secondary education. Yet colleges offer students different resources and educational experiences, which may introduce inequality in the returns to college enrollment. This dissertation uses nationally representative data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002) and the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to examine the effects of initial post-secondary enrollment decisions on three early adult outcomes: bachelor’s degree completion, economic disadvantage, and marriage. In Chapter 2, I use the ELS to ask how enrolling in broad-access four-year colleges, which have minimally or non-selective admissions policies, affects students' likelihood of degree completion relative to community college or more selective options. I find that attending a broad-access four-year college instead of a community college or a more selective college alters a student's chances of completing their degree in the expected direction and that mid-SES, Black, and Hispanic students face particularly large degree completion losses from attending a broad-access four-year college rather than a more selective four-year college. Chapter 3 uses NLSY97 data to investigate whether enrollment in a broad-access college offers more protection against economic disadvantage relative to community college or non-college options, or less protection relative to more-selective college enrollment. I find that, conditional on college enrollment, institutional variation has modest effects on poverty and low-wage work via differential bachelor’s degree completion. In contrast, I find more substantial effects relative to no college, demonstrating the importance of any college entry in preventing economic hardship and the pivotal role of bachelor's degree completion. In Chapter 4, I examine the relationship between an individual’s initial college enrollment, their overall likelihood of marriage, and the education of their spouse. I find that the bachelor’s degree advantages that accrue to college-goers who first enroll in more selective institutions lead to higher rates of marriage for men and a higher likelihood of marrying college-educated spouses for men and women. Thus, institutional stratification introduces heterogeneity in marriage outcomes in early adulthood. Overall, my findings emphasize the importance of supporting degree completion at all colleges in addition to equalizing access to more selective institutions.