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Do High School Gifted Programs Lead to Later-in-Life Success?

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Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of participation in gifted education programs, and offers several contributions to existing research. First, this paper studies the effects of high school programs, as opposed to the more commonly-studied elementary and middle school versions. Second, this paper considers impacts of gifted programs on later-in-life socioeconomic success, including college graduation and eventual employment, as opposed to short-run standardized test outcomes. Third, this paper uses sibling fixed effects, coupled with a recently-proposed decomposition method, as an identification approach. The main conclusion is that gifted programs tend to include students who possess traits that already correlate with later-in-life success. After controlling for those traits, gifted programs, per se, show little statistical relationship to later-in-life outcomes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, College of Business and Economics, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Hyland Hall 4400, Whitewater, WI, 53190, USA

    David M. Welsch

  2. Department of Economics, Gordon Ford College of Business, Western Kentucky University, Grise Hall 426, Bowling Green, KY, 42101, USA

    David M. Zimmer

Authors
  1. David M. Welsch
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  2. David M. Zimmer
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Correspondence to David M. Zimmer.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Welsch, D.M., Zimmer, D.M. Do High School Gifted Programs Lead to Later-in-Life Success?. J Labor Res 39, 201–218 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-017-9252-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-017-9252-9

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