Debt Aversion and the Demand for Loans for Post-Secondary Education.” Working paper, School of Social Sciences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report the results of an experiment designed to measure the impact of different forms of subsidies on the demand for post-secondary education financing among a sample of adults age 18-55 in Canada. The experiment presents subjects with a series of choices involving tradeoffs between cash payments and grants or loans earmarked for full or part time education. In addition, the experiment includes experimental measures of time and risk preferences, as well as an extensive survey of experience and attitudes. This paper focuses on the role of a person’s attitudes toward debt (Debt Aversion) and experience with debt (Debt Use) in the decision to take up financing for post-secondary education in the form of subsidized loans. Using survey measures, we find no evidence that aversion to debt is an important barrier to investment in post-secondary education. In addition, subjects with experience carrying and managing debt are more willing than others to take on additional debt to finance post-secondary education. Key words: field experiment, debt aversion, time preference, risk aversion, human capital investment, post-secondary education
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".