Abstract
Despite great focus on and public investment in STEM education, little causal evidence connects quantitative coursework to students' economic outcomes. I show that state changes in minimum high school math requirements substantially increase black students' completed math coursework and their later earnings. The marginal student's return to an additional math course is 10 percent, roughly half the return to a year of high school, and is partly explained by a shift toward more cognitively skilled occupations. Whites' coursework and earnings are unaffected. Rigorous standards for quantitative coursework can close meaningful portions of racial gaps in economic outcomes.
Highlights
At the 2013 White House Science Fair, President Obama said he was focused on how to “create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and math... and to make sure that all of us as a country are lifting up these subjects for the respect that they deserve.” His administration’s “Educate to Innovate” and “Computer Science for All” campaigns were the most recent in a long line of government initiatives focused on improving the mathematical and scientific skills of Americans
I constructed for each state and for each graduating class of 1982 through 1994 the minimum number of math, science, social studies, English and other courses a student would need to complete in order to receive a high school diploma, where “course” refers to a full year of study
The transcript data allow estimation of a first stage impact of the reforms on coursework, while the Census data allow estimation of the reduced form impact of the reforms on earnings. The ratio of these two estimates can be thought of as the instrumental variables estimate of the impact of math coursework on earnings, for the marginal student whose coursework is affected by such reforms
Summary
At the 2013 White House Science Fair, President Obama said he was focused on how to “create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and math... and to make sure that all of us as a country are lifting up these subjects for the respect that they deserve.” His administration’s “Educate to Innovate” and “Computer Science for All” campaigns were the most recent in a long line of government initiatives focused on improving the mathematical and scientific skills of Americans. The reforms studied here closed the majority of the black-white gap in the number of overall math courses completed and reduced by roughly one-tenth the black-white gaps in annual earnings and occupational cognitive skill Given that these reforms largely increased coursework in basic math, interventions successful at closing racial gaps in more advanced math coursework might further reduce gaps in economic outcomes. Joensen and Nielsen (2009) use a Danish high school reform to estimate a roughly 30 percent earnings increase from an advanced math curriculum, partly due to increased college attainment This work complements those papers by showing earnings returns to lower level math coursework even in the absence of significant increases in college attainment.
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