Overcoming the Odds

Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite evidence showing that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, critics of higher education increasingly argue that college “does not pay off” and some students - namely, disadvantaged prospective college goers - would be better served by forgoing higher education. But debates about the value of college often fail to carefully consider what is required to speak knowledgeably about the benefits –what a person’s life might look like had they not completed college, or their college counterfactual. In Overcoming the Odds sociologist Jennie E. Brand reveals the benefits of completing college by comparing life outcomes of college graduates with their college counterfactuals.     Drawing on two cohorts of nationally representative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys program, Brand uses matching and machine learning methods to estimate the effects of college completion across students with varying likelihoods of completing four-year degrees. To illustrate her findings, Brand describes outcomes using matched vignettes of college and non-college graduates. Brand shows that four-year college completion enables graduates to increase wages and household income, while also circumventing unemployment, low-wage work, job instability, poverty, and social assistance. Completing college also increases civic engagement. Most of these benefits are larger for disadvantaged than for more advantaged students, rendering arguments that college has limited benefits for unlikely graduates as flawed. Brand concludes that greater long-term earnings, and less job instability and unemployment, and thus more tax revenue, less reliance on public assistance, and high levels of volunteering indicate that public investment in higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds yields far-reaching collective benefits. She asserts that it is better for our society when more people complete college.   Overcoming the Odds is an innovative and enlightening exploration of how college can transform lives.