So sorry for this late newsletter. A combination of a bit too much travel for me and some unplanned family leave time for Socos held us up. At long last, however, you have more rambling nonsense to enlighten you.

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Research Roundup

Effort & Subjective Utility

What do measures of “effort” and “persistence” have to say about academic and career outcomes? A great deal, it turns out, …if you believe that effort will pay off.

In students, measures of effort predict earning an advanced degree 10 years later. But these outcomes aren’t simply mediated by the parent’s socioeconomic backgrounds but by the students' own “educational expectations”.

Similarly, student persistence predicted grade changes “between age 13 and age 16, over and above other childhood factors”. In fact, persistence at 13 predicted adult “income and occupational level” even after controlling for intelligence and educational attainment. Curiously, this association was only seen in men.

Why only men: women might have less reason to believe their effort will pay off. This is the exact finding from an analysis of “incentive inequality” driving racial gaps in college persistence. The “black undergraduate dropout rate is highest” precisely where the difference in economic outcomes between black and white workers is the highest…high school graduation and college entry”.

Further research shows that, historically, children’s expectations about their future are strongly associated with their parent’s educational attainment. However, more recent generations “had higher educational expectations that were less strongly related to achievement.” We’ve told students a good marketing story about university and career, but failed to back it up with realized benefits even as university enrollment expands.

If students and employees believe their effort to pay off, not just intellectually but via lived experience, then they put in more effort. In turn, this greater effort drives greater outcomes. Subject utility strikes again…again…again…

A Matter of Degrees

How much does a university education change us? Well, it’s a matter of degrees.

An analysis of “over a quarter million applicants and a discontinuity in the University of California’s admission rules” suggests that university admissions “reduce Republican registration and increase registration as independents or Democrats” while also raising participation in “Democratic presidential primaries.” But it’s not faculty influence; rather “peer socialization” drives these effects. (Curiously, another recent paper even finds that intelligence causes people to be more prosocial and anti-authoritarian.)

One degree that seems to buck this trend in economics, whose faculty and students tend to be a bit more politically conservative than their academic peers. “Access to the economics major shifts students' preferences toward business/finance careers” lifting their expected annual earnings by 46% over their second choice majors, largely due to “working in higher-paying industries.”

Further, “economics PhD recipients are substantially more likely to have highly educated parents, and less likely to have parents without a college degree, than PhD recipients in other disciplines.”

Is this the value add of an economics degree or more socialization? The study clubs at Harvard help answer that question. Students accepted into these exclusive clubs “earn 32% more than other students and are more likely to work in finance and join country clubs”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, an analysis of “random variation in room assignment” reveals how “exposure to high-status peers expands gaps in college club membership, adult social club membership, and finance careers by high school type, with large positive effects for private school students and zero or negative effects for others.”

Business degrees also show a strong effect of socialization on their earners that bucks the left-learning trend. CEOs without business degrees produce the same output, investment, or employment growth as MBA CEOs, but within 5 years of an MBA CEO taking over a firm “wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark.” The data suggests that these differences in business practice emerge as the “causal effects of practices and values acquired in business education”.

To some degree, you are who you meet.

Weekly Indulgence

Mad Science Solves is back! Our next monthly Q&A session on Tuesday, July 30 at 11 AM PST. Expect a lively discussion about…anything!

Grab your ticket here!

Stage & Screen

• July 22, DC: Keynote at Jobs For the Future Horizons!
• August 14-15 Napa: Mandrake Capital Partners

Upcoming this Fall (tentative)

• September 8, Athens: ESOMAR
• September 11, Seoul: World Knowledge Forum
• September 12-14, NYC: Out In Tech
• September 25, SF: BCG Australia
• September 26, Wyoming: Tetons Leadership Counsel
• October 1-4, Singapore: Hyper Island and more! (Book me!!!)

Find more upcoming talks, interviews, and other events on my Events Page.

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I love science fiction and always enjoy a good whodunit. Why not wrap them together in a post-apocalyptic thriller? The Last Murder at the End of the World has plenty of twisty revelations adding some enjoyable (and a bit of substance) to its grand mystery.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming