published in: J. Heckman and A. Krueger, Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy?, MIT Press, 2003
This paper considers alternative policies for promoting skill formation that are targeted to
different stages of the life cycle. We demonstrate the importance of both cognitive and
noncognitive skills that are formed early in the life cycle in accounting for racial, ethnic and
family background gaps in schooling and other dimensions of socioeconomic success. Most
of the gaps in college attendance and delay are determined by early family factors. Children
from better families and with high ability earn higher returns to schooling. We find only a
limited role for tuition policy or family income supplements in eliminating schooling and
college attendance gaps. At most 8% of American youth are credit constrained in the
traditional usage of that term. The evidence points to a high return to early interventions and
a low return to remedial or compensatory interventions later in the life cycle. Skill and ability
beget future skill and ability. At current levels of funding, traditional policies like tuition
subsidies, improvements in school quality, job training and tax rebates are unlikely to be
effective in closing gaps.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.