Russell, LaurenYu, LeiAndrews, Michael J.2021-09-152021-09-152022-06-23Lauren C. Russell, Lei Yu, Michael J. Andrews; Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2022; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01214http://hdl.handle.net/11603/22987https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01214We investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment. As counterfactuals for current college locations, we use historical “runner-up” locations that were strongly considered to become college sites but were ultimately not chosen. We find that winning counties today have college degree attainment rates 56% higher than runner-up counties and more private-sector employment in human-capital-intensive industries. These effects are not driven primarily by recent in-migration of educated adults, and alternative public investments did not have similar effects on local educational attainment. The results indicate that colleges played an important role in shaping long-run local outcomes.32 pagesen-US©2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologylocal educational attainmenthistorical natural experimentshuman capital sectorsText