- School segregation appears to have important effects on wages.
- School quality fails to explain the break in the trend toward racial wage equality.
- High School significantly and substantially affect students post graduation wages, in excess of any effect they may have on educational attainment. Yet characteristics of schools typically thought to measure educational quality -such as class size and the length of school year- do not explain these effects.
- Educational quality explains very little of the recent black/white wage trend. The average quality of schools attended by blacks and whites was nearly equal by the early 1970’s. Moreover, the returns to school quality were generally low and changed little over time.
- The instrumental variables estimates make no more compelling a case for the importance of these particular school characteristics than their OLS counterparts.