The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills

While there is abundant evidence to indicate that students make significant gains in verbal skills within school, surprisingly little is known about cognitive outcomes once individuals are separated from educational institutions. This paper develops a working causal model of the enduring effects of education which extends and elaborates Hyman, Wright and Reed's (1975) analysis. Unlike previous studies, the model developed here includes the estimated effects of intelligence measures. The data necessarily consist of a correlation matrix combined from several difference sources, primarily cross-sectional, which confound age with cohort differences. The results indicate that previous studies have seriously overestimated the enduring effects of education.