Essays on the Expansion of Higher Education

Belskaya, Volha

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March 19, 2019

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Belskaya, Volha
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, many developing countries expanded their higher education in order to become more competitive on international markets in future. The largest developing countries, Brazil, India, and Russia, tripled the number of college students per 100,000, and China increased the number of students twelve-fold. This expansion led to the influx of college graduates into the labor market, which had to adjust to the increase in the supply of educated workers. Existing literature shows how the adjustments associated with college expansion happen but many questions remain unanswered. This dissertation evaluates the expansion of higher education in Russia and the effect of expansion on Russian labor market. The dissertation focuses on two features of the expansion. First, college expansion is usually associated with an increasing participation of women in college education. When the share of educated female workers grows faster than the share of educated male workers, the gender gap in higher education narrows. Between 1990 and 2008, the number of female students in higher education in Russia tripled from 1.4 to 4.3 million and the share of female students rose from 50 to 58 percent. The first chapter estimates education externalities created by the educated men and women in the labor markets and evaluates whether the faster growth of college participation among women affects the gender wage gap through education externalities. Second, during the expansion many new campuses open, providing the access to college to individuals who were previously constrained. The second chapter co-authored with Klara Sabirianova Peter and Christian M. Posso evaluates whether the expansion of higher education is economically worthwhile based on a recent surge in the number of campuses and college graduates in Russia. The empirical strategy relies on the marginal treatment effect method in both normal and semi-parametric versions, and estimating policy-influenced treatment parameters for the marginal students who are directly affected by college expansion. Both of these questions associated with college expansion are heavily understudied in economics and this is where my dissertation contributes to the literature.

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