Long-Run Educational Attainment E ects of Local Colleges: Evidence from the Establishment of US Colleges

Abstract

We study the e ects of a college on local education attainment using historical college establishment experiments in which "runner-up" locations were strongly considered to become college sites but ultimately not chosen for as-good-as-random reasons. While losing counties have since had opportunity to establish their own colleges, we show that winners have more years of exposure to a college over their history and are more likely to have a college today. Using this variation, we find that winners have 14 percentage points higher contemporary rates of bachelor's and graduate degree attainment. This educational attainment gap has widened over time