The Educated Student

Examining the educated and the trained.

Gender Wage Disparities among the Highly Educated.

In the U.S. college-educated women earn approximately 30 percent less than their non-Hispanic white male counterparts. We conduct an empirical examination of this wage disparity for four groups of women-non-Hispanic white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-using the National Survey of College Graduates, a large data set that provides unusually detailed information on higher-level education. Nonparamet...

Job Satisfaction of the Highly Educated

The determinants of job satisfaction are estimated for Ph.D. level scientists in the United States across academic and nonacademic sectors. Female scientists report lower job satisfaction than males in academia but higher job satisfaction than males in the nonacademic sector. Academic scientists with tenure have substantially greater job satisfaction than non-academic scientists but academic sc...

Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor

Half of college students drop out without completing a degree. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and degree completion. I use quasi-experimental methodology to analyze two state scholarship programs. The programs increase the share of the exposed population with a college degree by three percentage points, with stronger effects among women. A cost-benefit analysis indic...

Social Networks of Educated Nematodes

Entomopathogenic nematodes are obligate lethal parasitoids of insect larvae that navigate a chemically complex belowground environment while interacting with their insect hosts, plants, and each other. In this environment, prior exposure to volatile compounds appears to prime nematodes in a compound specific manner, increasing preference for volatiles they previously were exposed to and decreas...