Instructor Value-Added in Post-Secondary Education

• In Event: Unpacking the Black Box of Institutional Quality in Higher Education

Abstract

Value-added methods are widely used in economics and education to measure how heterogeneous agents contribute to outcomes. While instructor value added has been widely studied in K-12 schools and is an active area of policy debate, few papers have attempted to study it in postsecondary institutions. This is because credible estimates hinge on quasi-random exposure to faculty, which is difficult in higher education settings where students often select courses and instructors based on unobserved characteristics. This study develops a novel value-added method for higher-education that groups students with similar course histories together and identifies instructor effects within these groups by comparing outcomes among students in the same course with different instructors. Applying this method across institutional settings in two different states, this study finds that the new method performs as well as estimates using random assignment of students to instructors, and it shows that instructor quality significantly affects students' future grades and earnings, with a large portion of the effect on earnings operating through students’ major choice. The method can be applied at any university; applying the method to data from nearly all public universities in Texas, we show it substantially reduces forecast bias. Overall, instructor quality significantly affects future grades and earnings: a one standard deviation improvement raises next-semester GPA by 0.05 points and earnings by 5%. About half of instructor’s effect on earnings operates through major choice. Value-added is only weakly correlated with student evaluations, and replacing the bottom 5% of instructors based on value-added to earnings instead of evaluations could increase affected students’ earnings by up to 4%. In addition to providing a credible method that can be used to assess the impact of faculty independent of state contexts, this paper suggests that strategic management of faculty may be a valuable and underused tool for improving student outcomes in higher education.

Author

• Anthony Yim, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
  Presenting Author