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Overcoming the Odds

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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.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 5, 2024

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The speaker discusses their long-standing interest in educational inequality and shares insights from their academic journey over the past 25 years. Starting as an undergraduate working in classrooms with disadvantaged students, they later pursued graduate studies and researched the impacts of college attendance on various life outcomes. Their thesis revealed that students with lower odds of attending selective colleges reap substantial benefits from completing college, prompting a continued exploration in this area during their postdoctoral studies.

At UCLA, the speaker observed that first-generation college students and students of color often remarked on the transformative effects of college on their lives. This video video motivated them to examine civic engagement and the broader impacts of college education, compiling their findings into a book that highlights the long-term benefits of degree completion, particularly for marginalized groups.

The research utilized extensive data from national surveys, particularly focusing on how college completion influences socioeconomic status, job stability, civic engagement, and family formation. Statistical methods, including machine learning and matching analyses, were employed to assess outcomes for college graduates versus non-graduates.

The findings indicate that college graduation significantly benefits disadvantaged individuals, helping to reduce poverty, unemployment, and dependency on social assistance, while enhancing earnings and civic participation. The speaker emphasizes the importance of framing education not just in terms of individual gain but as a collective societal good, advocating for public investment in higher education to promote equal opportunities and strengthen communities.

In conclusion, the speaker argues that a broader understanding of educational implications is critical, especially in combatting flawed narratives surrounding the diminishing value of college degrees. They contend that increased access to higher education delivers long-lasting benefits, particularly for those who historically have faced barriers to completion.

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My interests in educational inequality really go back

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to my undergraduate days, some 25 years ago when

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I was working in classrooms

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and studied a d tracking program

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that supported disadvantaged students

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to achieve in high school and attend college.

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And then, as I pursued graduate studies at the University

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of Wisconsin, I continued these interests in educational

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inequality and also developed interests in causal inference.

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And when I was writing my thesis in graduate school,

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I uncovered this interesting pattern about how students

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with a low likelihood to attend, in this case,

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selective colleges have these really large returns

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and even the largest returns to attending than those

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with a higher likelihood, the more advantaged students.

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So I kept pursuing that, that field of study

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as a postdoc at the University of Michigan,

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I started working with a colleague Y

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and we looked at the effects

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of college completion on earnings,

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and again, saw this pretty striking pattern, a pattern.

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We started calling negative selection that students unlikely

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to complete college reap these really large rewards.

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And then in my early years at UCLA,

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I explored other outcomes, family formation pattern, civic

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participation, and saw some similar, patterns

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of, for these really large returns.

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And I learned a great deal from my UCLA students.

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So students generally expressed many benefits

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of completing college, but it was my first generation

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students, students of color, students

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who really overcame the odds against 'em

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to attain these high levels of education,

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who invariably kind of told me

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that college changed the course of their life.

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And many of them also told me they wanted to go back

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to their communities and their youth.

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And that motivated some work on civic participation.

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So the book was this effort to kind of compile

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and advance, the work that I'd been doing on variation

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and effects of college for, over 20 years now.

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And, and I wanted to show the ways that college is worth it,

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particularly for those students on the margin

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who may be choosing whether or not to attend

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and who face, you know, a lot of hurdles along the way.

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So my goal was to assess how long-term benefits

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of four year degree completion varies across the population

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and to look at a large range of outcomes, socioeconomic,

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family level, social assistance, civic outcome measures.

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So I draw on nationally representative longitudinal survey

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data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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This is the National Longitudinal Surveys Program.

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Um, and I draw on two cohorts from

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the National Longitudinal Surveys

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and then look at the effects

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of college completion on these long-term life outcomes.

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Um, and so I conduct statistical analysis

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to assess the differential effects of completing degrees

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and comparing those who completed a four year college degree

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to those who didn't, and, and,

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and look at these various outcomes.

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And I use a variety of statistical approaches,

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matching machine learning models to, to do this.

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Um, and over the years I've worked

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with fantastic collaborators, both faculty

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and a lot of my graduate students to kind

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of inform these analyses and make the book what it was.

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First, as I was saying about the,

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the National Longitudinal Surveys program

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that's been ongoing for more than 50 years.

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So we have these great longitudinal data

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that looks at these two cohorts born in their early 1960s

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and early 1980s.

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And then I'm able to follow them

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because this has been ongoing for so long

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to follow these individuals over time

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and see how their lives unfold

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after they,

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either complete college or don't complete college.

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Uh, and then, so to assess the effects of completion,

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we wanna draw on these counterfactual comparisons

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of different outcomes.

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So the outcome when an individual completed college

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and the out kind of the, the outcome, when

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that same individual ideally did not complete college,

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that would be our, our best way to assess the effects.

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And in theory, we could observe, you know,

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the outcome had someone gone and not gone to college.

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But in reality, of course, only one state is observed.

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So we, we turned to these statistical approaches to

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estimate the unobserved counterfactual pathway.

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What would've happened had that person not,

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completed a college degree.

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So that's where I turn to these matching analyses

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and machine learning approaches to estimate effects.

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And then look how those effects vary across different

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subgroups of students and matching is pretty intuitive.

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We, we take someone who graduated from college

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and compare their life outcomes to someone

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who had the same estimated likelihood

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of graduating from college,

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but didn't actually complete a degree for whatever reasons,

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and, and then estimate the effects based

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on all these match pairs.

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So we take thousands of match pairs

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and look at the average outcomes, across 'em, then

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to make the, the book more,

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and even more intuitive and appealing.

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And, and with all these quantitative analyses,

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I constructed 12 matched vignettes to describe some

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of the narratives of both the college

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and non-college graduates.

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So this gave, you know, some names

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to these people from the National Longitudinal Survey data

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and how their lives looked similar before college

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and how they diverged after college.

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And you know, what it, what it kind of looked like.

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So the problem, that that's ideally

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how we wanna do things in, in public and in the press.

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And in a lot of discourse, people kind

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of routinely make statements without reference

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to any counterfactual.

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So in the book, I kind of consider a lot of forms of

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what I would call a kind of faulty reasoning related

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to the value of a college degree.

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So for example, you get these articles like,

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too many students are going to college

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or are too many students going,

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and that college may not be the best option for,

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for all students.

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Usually the basis for concluding that a lot of people in,

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in a lot of these cases, let's say they, they refer

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to people who didn't score high on some threshold on a test

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or something that they shouldn't pursue a college degree, is

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how they compare to students with a high test score.

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They don't draw on counterfactual comparisons of

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what these students would be doing had they not gone

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to college and what the value is, you know, by,

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by making those types of comparisons.

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And they usually don't even look at the outcomes

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associated with the degree.

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Maybe it's the experience within college itself

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or, you know, a year out of college, so they're doing this

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or that, and not the long term life trajectories

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and across a range of different domains.

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Others have argued that

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low income students are mismatched on college campuses

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relative to high income students.

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Again, not drawing on counterfactuals affirmative action

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policies have, in some narratives, hurt, claim

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that they hurt students by placing them in situations

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where they can't compete.

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And, and all these kinds of debates, the,

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the same comparisons are habitually invoked that

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between the achievement of different college students

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with different backgrounds

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or races, it's not between, you know, these,

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these counterfactuals and what we'd see long term

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and how these, these lives unfold.

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Um, and then a lot of debates kind of point

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to the students are struggling

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to find stable jobs or they're in debt.

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Um, and even contend that it's, it's, it's obvious that,

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you know, colleges don't guarantee success,

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have seen quotes like that.

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Uh, and there's often this, this implication that students

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who can't afford to pay tuition

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and who are taking on debt shouldn't be attending college.

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And there's, again, there's no mention of kind

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of long-term benefits to college estimated

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by counterfactual trajectories.

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And so that's just a, a very common, you know, reasoning

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that's invoked in, in popular discourse that

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that doesn't really get at the value of degrees.

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Um, and the, the, the final one that kind

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of comes up a lot is that college degree returns are

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decreasing across generations

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or that, you know, students are filling jobs that

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previously didn't require a degree,

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or they're working at Starbucks after, you know, a year

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after school or something.

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Same kind of problem, not addressing counterfactual.

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And we know that returns to college are

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increasing, not decreasing.

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And, you know, many jobs have changed requirements

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because of increasingly complex tasks

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associated with these positions.

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So even if returns had been decreasing,

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it doesn't invalidate the return, to the degree.

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And because if we consider

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what people would be doing in the absence of a degree

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who don't hold a college degree, their,

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their prospects are increasingly limited.

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Um, so in each case, these types of comparisons kind

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of obscure the logic of causal effects and,

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and don't always describe, you know, the long term outcomes

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and look at the value of college with a counterfactual lens.

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Um, and so, so what are the effects of,

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of college across, students?

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So throughout the book, I ask not only

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how a four year degree increases wages

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and income over the career,

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but how it also reduces low wage careers, job instability,

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low skilled work poverty,

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how it reduces social assistance

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and increases civic engagement.

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And, and evaluating this dis differential response

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to four year completion, find that the benefits

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for unlikely college graduates are, are very large.

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So its college reaches a more diverse population.

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It kind of entails more diverse benefits.

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And so for disadvantaged use,

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I observe these increases in wages, household income, civic

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and political participation,

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but also find that completing college circumvent

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a lot of disadvantage.

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Unemployment, low wage work, job instability,

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family poverty, social assistance,

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and the patterns are very similar across the two cohorts.

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So we're seeing the same kind of, set of, set of results

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for the more recent cohort who were,

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were at the time in their thirties.

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It's not that college equalizes everything.

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Um, so I, I find that it equalizes a large range

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of outcomes, especially those disadvantaged

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ways in which it disa, you know,

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circumvents that disadvantage.

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Those look very equal across college graduates.

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But for things like who marries whom

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and household income, I see a lot of large benefits

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for the more advantaged students as well.

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And some of those are even larger.

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So college doesn't, you know, completely eradicate,

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social background as we wouldn't expect it to.

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But we see these, these really large returns for the

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more disadvantaged youth would always say everyone benefits.

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There's, there's kind of broad benefits

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and there's notably large benefits

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for advantage college graduates.

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Those are saying for those for kind of family formation,

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household income and wages.

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You know, we see a lot of benefit there,

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but for a range of these other outcomes,

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disadvantaged students benefit more.

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And there we see the negative selection really coming into

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play for all those things I mentioned.

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Um, now all the labor market insecurity, poverty,

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social assistance, and so forth.

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And so the kind of the sum of the findings

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that present throughout suggests

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that completing college has larger benefits for those,

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those outcomes for disadvantaged graduates.

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And a lot of this is very consistent

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with a large literature showing these,

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These large benefits for unlikely graduates.

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Universities have really long held an ideal

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that higher education should extend

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beyond traditionally served students.

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That the kind of task of demo democratic society is

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to preserve the ideal of liberal education

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and to extend it as far as possible to all,

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all members of the population.

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Yet we're at a place where college completion rates in the

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US are, are problematically low,

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we have more students attending,

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but the completion rates have,

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have stagnated to some degree.

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And so those who contend that college attendance

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and completion have limited benefits, kind of reinforce

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that it, that inequality and,

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and harm the lives of people who might have gone to college

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and experienced these benefits,

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but, might have been swayed otherwise.

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Um, and especially those disadvantaged youth and,

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and those who contend that there are limited benefits,

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those, those arguments tend to be flawed

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because a college degree is especially benefit, beneficial

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for, for these, students, unlikely to complete degrees.

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So I think investment in higher education

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benefits are collective wellbeing or democratic society.

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There's greater long-term earnings, more tax revenue,

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less reliance on public assistance,

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higher levels of volunteering.

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All that indicates that public investment in higher

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education for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

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These yields, these kind of far-reaching societal benefits.

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If we frame education in terms of individual rewards,

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it's more challenging to kind

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of garner widespread public support

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and expand to a more diverse population.

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I think we should demand a society based on this idea

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of a public good, a collective good,

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rather than one based on individualism and scarcity

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and acknowledge the widespread benefits collectively.

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If we invest in more students,

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obtaining four year degrees.

Examining Educational Inequality and College Outcomes

00:00:00 - My interests in educational inequality really go back to my undergraduate days, some 25 years ago when I was working in classrooms and studied a d tracking program that supported disadvantaged students to achieve in high school and attend college. And then, as I pursued graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, I continued these interests in educational inequality and also developed interests in causal inference. And when I was writing my thesis in graduate school,
00:00:34 - with a low likelihood to attend, in this case, selective colleges have these really large returns and even the largest returns to attending than those with a higher likelihood, the more advantaged students. So I kept pursuing that, that field of study as a postdoc at the University of Michigan, I started working with a colleague Y and we looked at the effects of college completion on earnings, and again, saw this pretty striking pattern, a pattern.
00:01:05 - to complete college reap these really large rewards. And then in my early years at UCLA, I explored other outcomes, family formation pattern, civic participation, and saw some similar, patterns of, for these really large returns. And I learned a great deal from my UCLA students. So students generally expressed many benefits of completing college, but it was my first generation students, students of color, students
00:01:35 - to attain these high levels of education, who invariably kind of told me that college changed the course of their life. And many of them also told me they wanted to go back to their communities and their youth. And that motivated some work on civic participation. So the book was this effort to kind of compile and advance, the work that I'd been doing on variation and effects of college for, over 20 years now. And, and I wanted to show the ways that college is worth it,
00:02:07 - who may be choosing whether or not to attend and who face, you know, a lot of hurdles along the way. So my goal was to assess how long-term benefits of four year degree completion varies across the population and to look at a large range of outcomes, socioeconomic, family level, social assistance, civic outcome measures. So I draw on nationally representative longitudinal survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the National Longitudinal Surveys Program.
00:02:41 - the National Longitudinal Surveys and then look at the effects of college completion on these long-term life outcomes. and so I conduct statistical analysis to assess the differential effects of completing degrees and comparing those who completed a four year college degree to those who didn't, and, and, and look at these various outcomes. And I use a variety of statistical approaches, matching machine learning models to, to do this.

Assessing College Completion Through Longitudinal Data

00:03:13 - with fantastic collaborators, both faculty and a lot of my graduate students to kind of inform these analyses and make the book what it was. First, as I was saying about the, the National Longitudinal Surveys program that's been ongoing for more than 50 years. So we have these great longitudinal data that looks at these two cohorts born in their early 1960s and early 1980s. And then I'm able to follow them because this has been ongoing for so long
00:03:44 - and see how their lives unfold after they, either complete college or don't complete college. and then, so to assess the effects of completion, we wanna draw on these counterfactual comparisons of different outcomes. So the outcome when an individual completed college and the out kind of the, the outcome, when that same individual ideally did not complete college, that would be our, our best way to assess the effects. And in theory, we could observe, you know,
00:04:16 - But in reality, of course, only one state is observed. So we, we turned to these statistical approaches to estimate the unobserved counterfactual pathway. What would've happened had that person not, completed a college degree. So that's where I turn to these matching analyses and machine learning approaches to estimate effects. And then look how those effects vary across different subgroups of students and matching is pretty intuitive. We, we take someone who graduated from college
00:04:48 - who had the same estimated likelihood of graduating from college, but didn't actually complete a degree for whatever reasons, and, and then estimate the effects based on all these match pairs. So we take thousands of match pairs and look at the average outcomes, across 'em, then to make the, the book more, and even more intuitive and appealing. And, and with all these quantitative analyses, I constructed 12 matched vignettes to describe some
00:05:18 - and non-college graduates. So this gave, you know, some names to these people from the National Longitudinal Survey data and how their lives looked similar before college and how they diverged after college. And you know, what it, what it kind of looked like. So the problem, that that's ideally how we wanna do things in, in public and in the press. And in a lot of discourse, people kind of routinely make statements without reference
00:05:50 - So in the book, I kind of consider a lot of forms of what I would call a kind of faulty reasoning related to the value of a college degree. So for example, you get these articles like, too many students are going to college or are too many students going, and that college may not be the best option for, for all students. Usually the basis for concluding that a lot of people in, in a lot of these cases, let's say they, they refer to people who didn't score high on some threshold on a test

Analyzing the True Value of College Education

00:06:22 - how they compare to students with a high test score. They don't draw on counterfactual comparisons of what these students would be doing had they not gone to college and what the value is, you know, by, by making those types of comparisons. And they usually don't even look at the outcomes associated with the degree. Maybe it's the experience within college itself or, you know, a year out of college, so they're doing this or that, and not the long term life trajectories
00:06:53 - Others have argued that low income students are mismatched on college campuses relative to high income students. Again, not drawing on counterfactuals affirmative action policies have, in some narratives, hurt, claim that they hurt students by placing them in situations where they can't compete. And, and all these kinds of debates, the, the same comparisons are habitually invoked that between the achievement of different college students
00:07:22 - or races, it's not between, you know, these, these counterfactuals and what we'd see long term and how these, these lives unfold. and then a lot of debates kind of point to the students are struggling to find stable jobs or they're in debt. and even contend that it's, it's, it's obvious that, you know, colleges don't guarantee success, have seen quotes like that. and there's often this, this implication that students who can't afford to pay tuition
00:07:54 - And there's, again, there's no mention of kind of long-term benefits to college estimated by counterfactual trajectories. And so that's just a, a very common, you know, reasoning that's invoked in, in popular discourse that that doesn't really get at the value of degrees. and the, the, the final one that kind of comes up a lot is that college degree returns are decreasing across generations or that, you know, students are filling jobs that
00:08:25 - or they're working at Starbucks after, you know, a year after school or something. Same kind of problem, not addressing counterfactual. And we know that returns to college are increasing, not decreasing. And, you know, many jobs have changed requirements because of increasingly complex tasks associated with these positions. So even if returns had been decreasing, it doesn't invalidate the return, to the degree. And because if we consider what people would be doing in the absence of a degree
00:08:56 - their prospects are increasingly limited. so in each case, these types of comparisons kind of obscure the logic of causal effects and, and don't always describe, you know, the long term outcomes and look at the value of college with a counterfactual lens. and so, so what are the effects of, of college across, students? So throughout the book, I ask not only how a four year degree increases wages and income over the career,

Benefits of College for Disadvantaged Graduates

00:09:31 - low skilled work poverty, how it reduces social assistance and increases civic engagement. And, and evaluating this dis differential response to four year completion, find that the benefits for unlikely college graduates are, are very large. So its college reaches a more diverse population. It kind of entails more diverse benefits. And so for disadvantaged use,
00:10:01 - and political participation, but also find that completing college circumvent a lot of disadvantage. Unemployment, low wage work, job instability, family poverty, social assistance, and the patterns are very similar across the two cohorts. So we're seeing the same kind of, set of, set of results for the more recent cohort who were, were at the time in their thirties. It's not that college equalizes everything. so I, I find that it equalizes a large range
00:10:35 - ways in which it disa, you know, circumvents that disadvantage. Those look very equal across college graduates. But for things like who marries whom and household income, I see a lot of large benefits for the more advantaged students as well. And some of those are even larger. So college doesn't, you know, completely eradicate, social background as we wouldn't expect it to. But we see these, these really large returns for the more disadvantaged youth would always say everyone benefits.
00:11:07 - and there's notably large benefits for advantage college graduates. Those are saying for those for kind of family formation, household income and wages. You know, we see a lot of benefit there, but for a range of these other outcomes, disadvantaged students benefit more. And there we see the negative selection really coming into play for all those things I mentioned. now all the labor market insecurity, poverty,
00:11:37 - And so the kind of the sum of the findings that present throughout suggests that completing college has larger benefits for those, those outcomes for disadvantaged graduates. And a lot of this is very consistent with a large literature showing these, These large benefits for unlikely graduates. Universities have really long held an ideal that higher education should extend beyond traditionally served students. That the kind of task of demo democratic society is
00:12:10 - and to extend it as far as possible to all, all members of the population. Yet we're at a place where college completion rates in the US are, are problematically low, we have more students attending, but the completion rates have, have stagnated to some degree. And so those who contend that college attendance and completion have limited benefits, kind of reinforce that it, that inequality and, and harm the lives of people who might have gone to college

Collective Benefits of Higher Education Investment

00:12:40 - but, might have been swayed otherwise. and especially those disadvantaged youth and, and those who contend that there are limited benefits, those, those arguments tend to be flawed because a college degree is especially benefit, beneficial for, for these, students, unlikely to complete degrees. So I think investment in higher education benefits are collective wellbeing or democratic society. There's greater long-term earnings, more tax revenue,
00:13:14 - higher levels of volunteering. All that indicates that public investment in higher education for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. These yields, these kind of far-reaching societal benefits. If we frame education in terms of individual rewards, it's more challenging to kind of garner widespread public support and expand to a more diverse population. I think we should demand a society based on this idea of a public good, a collective good,
00:13:52 - and acknowledge the widespread benefits collectively. If we invest in more students, obtaining four year degrees.

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