UCLA

Abstract

This dissertation uses panel data to quantitatively assess the effects of college completion and elite college attendance on individual labor market outcomes during the Great Recession (2007-09). The effects of the Great Recession, the most protracted and severe economic downturn experienced in the U.S. since World War II, were felt unevenly across levels of educational attainment. After controlling for observable precollege variables such as cognitive ability, socioeconomic and demographic background, and high school experiences, substantial treatment effects of college completion remained during the Great Recession, though these were heterogeneous across the type of outcome and across individuals. Disadvantaged individuals benefitted the most from college completion on measures of employment, while more advantaged individuals benefitted greatest from college on measures of job quality. Furthermore, comparing effects of college among young workers who experienced expansionary economic contexts to those who experienced recessionary contexts showed that the patterns of effects described above were specific to recessionary contexts. Thus, experiencing a recessionary context led to an increase in the effect of college on employment among those least likely to complete college, and an increase in the effect of college on job quality for those most likely to complete college, conditional on employment. These results are consistent with the job competition model of the labor market, which utilizes a labor queue and predicts occupational downgrading at the top of the labor queue and crowding out of employment near the bottom of the labor queue. A similar hypothesis was not supported for the effects of elite college attendance during the Great Recession. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the economic context interacts with the effects of educational attainment on individual labor market outcomes in uneven ways, producing a unique constellation of education effects according to the economic context. Therefore, fluctuations in the business cycle can contribute to the stratification of individuals by affecting their labor market outcomes directly, but also by affecting the relationships between preexisting individual characteristics, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes.