Two good pieces in Inside Higher Ed look into Caroline Hoxby’s controversial NBER report. Neither of them is vindicating.
IRS
One More Thing on NBER Report: Where did pre-2011 data come from?
The closer we look, the worse it seems.
New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed
Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University just published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”. This report is a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis.