Document View

James J. Heckman responds to the Dec 30, 1996 Outlook column on college tuition costs and family income, which restated the conventional claims that family income and tuition costs are important determinants of college attendance. Heckman says that while there is a strong relationship between family income and college attendance, this relationship can be given several interpretations.

Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Jan 28, 1997

Your Dec. 30 The Outlook column on college tuition costs and family income restates the conventional wisdom that family income is an important determinant of the college attendance decision. It also restates the conventional claim made by sociologists and educational planners that tuition costs are important barriers to college attendance.

This conventional wisdom is based on very casual evidence, and the conventional interpretation of this relationship is questionable. While there is a strong empirical relationship between family income and college attendance, this relationship can be given several interpretations. One is the interpretation given in the article -- that a shortage of cash prevents people from going to school. That interpretation motivates the tuition and aid policies discussed in the article.

There is a second interpretation, however, that tempers enthusiasm for such policies and that is consistent with more refined studies of the evidence. This interpretation is developed in a series of papers I have written with Stephen Cameron of Columbia University. Family income is a good approximation for the long-term environment that nourishes children. When measures of ability are entered into equations used to predict college enrollment, the importance of tuition and family income in predicting enrollment in college greatly diminishes. Essentially the same finding is reported in "The Bell Curve" by Murray and Herrnstein. It is the long-run factors that produce ability and not short-run "cash constraints" that are powerful predictors of the college attendance and graduation decision. These factors cannot be readily reversed by tuition and short-run-incomes policies to supplement family income. Students attracted into college by such policies are less able and benefit less from education.

It would be a great mistake to base educational policy on a crude empirical relationship that does not account for the fundamental limitations placed on the ability of individuals as determined by their families and their environments.

James J. Heckman

The University of Chicago

Department of Economics

Chicago