Tuesday, April 30, 2024, Vancouver, BC: Professor and Nobel Laureate David Card, from the University of California, Berkeley, visited VSE to present recent research and reconnect with faculty and students. The paper, titled, “Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds?” works to measure the effects of gifted programs on later educational outcomes for Florida students.
David Card is the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was President of the AEA in 2021 and co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021. The talk was presented by Thomas Lemieux, who has worked previously with Card and directs the Stone Centre at UBC.
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Abstract: Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely than their peers to succeed in high school and enter college. The disparities are wider for boys, leading to large gaps in college entry between low-income girls and boys of similar cognitive ability. We study how gifted status in 5th grade – determined by having an IQ score ≥ 116 – affects college entry rates of disadvantaged children in a large urban school district. For boys with IQ’s around the cutoff, gifted identification raises the
college entry rate by 25-30 percentage points, closing the gap with their female counterparts. In contrast, we find small effects for girls. Patterns of treatment effect heterogeneity suggests that the gender gap arises because of diminishing returns to gifted services. Further analysis of course taking and grade outcomes in middle and high school suggests that gifted boys take more advanced classes, particularly in math, opening a pathway to college.