The Will Rogers Effect

If you have fewer people not going to college then they are more negatively selected which is the word we tend to use in the profession. So it brings down both groups right. The first group we looked at which was the midlife whites. If you look between 1990 and 2015 there was very little difference in the fraction of them that had a college degree but more broadly that has been increasing over time. But if you look at for instance life expectancy for people without a BA or life expectancy at 25 because at birth you can't tell whether they have a BA or not right. And what happened was that rose until about 2010 and then it started going down and it's been going down ever since right