Faculty Articles

What You Do in High School Matters: High School GPA, Educational Attainment, and Labor Market Earnings as a Young Adult

ISBN or ISSN

0094-5056

Publication Title

Eastern Economic Journal

Volume

41

Issue

3

Publication Date / Copyright Date

5-19-2014

First Page

370

Last Page

386

Publisher

Springer Nature

DOI Number

10.1057/eej.2014.22

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.

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences | Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

Keywords

earnings, educational attainment, high school grades, panel data

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