Question

Lots of studies show that there are huge, huge returns to attending college. Other studies show that there are huge, huge returns to providing high quality day care and pre-school services to at risk children. A. Explain the selection bias inherent in studies of the wage or salary returns to college education. B. Is there a similar selection bias in studies looking at the impacts of high quality day care and pre-school programs?

Answer 1

There might be severe selection bias when it comes to determining the returns to college education. For example, governments all around the world tend to take surveys of the schools and colleges that are within the cities and big villages. Schools in remote areas are often neglected, thereby leading to huge distortions in the actual educational quality of schools. Even the children who pass out of the big schools are the ones who belong to well to do families, which means their income levels are already high even before they have joined school. Thus, this leads to severe selection bias.

There is a similar selection bias when it comes to determining the impacts of high quality day care and pre school programs This sort of bias is very much prevent in developing countries, wherein the govermnemnts are unable to provide the provision of good quality day care to huge majorities of population, and takes into account a selected few day care centres when they measure the quality of the healthelcare provision.