Changes in Relative Ability as a Determinant of the U.S. College Premium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We develop a macroeconomic framework to estimate the importance of fluctuations in relative ability in accounting for trends in the college premium in the United States since 1965. The theoretical scaffolding is a heterogeneous agent model with two dimensions of ability and endogenous schooling choice, with exogenous skill-biased technological change (SBTC), college tuition, and noneconomic social forces. We solve for conditions under which SBTC reduces the relative ability of college educated workers, and show that these conditions are met in the data. We attribute the drop in the college premium over the 1970s to a 25.5% drop in the mean relative quality of college-educated workers from 1968 to 1977. We find that SBTC explains about two thirds of the increase in college attendance since 1965, and that absent both supply shifts and a supply response to SBTC, the relative wage of highly educated workers would have been 77.1% larger in 2013.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".