Even after accounting for differences in observed student ability, students coming from lower-income households are less likely to attend college. If they attend college, lower-income students are also more likely to attend a two-year community college.
Measures of student ability typically used for college admissions implicitly reflect differences in family income across students. However, high school GPA reflects differences in income noticeably less than SAT and ACT scores. However, SAT and ACT scores do capture aspects of student ability missed by school-specific rankings alone.
Student performance in high school is a strong predictor of future success at college, including performance at two-year and four-year colleges, the likelihood of transferring from two-year colleges to four-year colleges, and eventually obtaining degrees.
PWBM projects that the revenue-raising provisions in the House Ways and Means Reconciliation Bill would raise roughly $2.4 trillion from 2022 to 2031.
The USDA re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan increases the average SNAP benefit by $36.24 per person per month starting in October 2021. PWBM projects that the increase in SNAP spending lowers GDP by 0.2 percent by 2031. People who receive SNAP as well as older working age individuals are helped by policy change while young people with high incomes as well as rich retirees are harmed due to lower future wages and a fall in the return to capital.
By 2051, we find that a combination of targeted preschool and targeted childcare programs increase GDP by 0.1 percent relative to current policy, even if deficit financed. Universal versions of these programs are more costly and would instead reduce GDP by 0.2 percent by 2051.
We analyze a combination of net revenue raisers consistent with the requirements released by the Senate Budget Committee on August 9th, 2021, for budget reconciliation.
About 30 percent of students who first attend two-year community college are from families with incomes above the median income for students attending four-year colleges. Moreover, upwards of one-fifth of top students from relatively small and large high schools first attend a two-year institution.
The bipartisan Senate infrastructure deal, endorsed by President Biden, authorizes about $548 billion in additional infrastructure investments, which we estimate is funded by $132 billion in new tax provisions and $351 billion in new deficits. We project that proposal would have no significant effect on GDP by end of the budget window (2031) or in the long run (2050).
