Faculty Articles
What You Do in High School Matters: High School GPA, Educational Attainment, and Labor Market Earnings as a Young Adult
Publication Title
Eastern Economic Journal
Publisher
Springer Nature
ISSN
0094-5056
Publication Date
5-19-2014
Keywords
earnings, educational attainment, high school grades, panel data
Abstract
Using abstracted grades and other data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, we investigate the relationships between cumulative high school grade point average (GPA), educational attainment, and labor market earnings among a sample of young adults (ages 24–34). We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender. Interesting and somewhat unexpected findings emerge for race in that, after controlling for innate ability, academic performance, and other economic and demographic variables, African Americans advance further in the formal educational system than their White counterparts. Various sensitivity tests support the stability of the core findings.
DOI
10.1057/eej.2014.22
Volume
41
Issue
3
First Page
370
Last Page
386
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences | Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
NSUWorks Citation
French, Michael T; Homer, Jenny F.; Popovici, Ioana; and Robins, Philip K., "What You Do in High School Matters: High School GPA, Educational Attainment, and Labor Market Earnings as a Young Adult" (2014). Faculty Articles. 272.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hpd_corx_facarticles/272
