Links for 1/26/10

Alan Ruby

India's new reform-minded minister in charge of higher education, Kapil Sibal, has endorsed the entry of foreign universities into the country and recently visited several leading institutions in the United States, hoping to encourage them to set up operations.

Medicinesux HT: Edububble

the cost to attend medical school in the United States has risen so “astronomically” that it is now cheaper to go to outer space!

Damon Clark and Heather Royer

There is a strong, positive and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. There is much less evidence on the extent to which this correlation reflects the causal effect of education on health - the parameter of interest for policy. In this paper we attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with estimating the causal effect of education on health. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp differences in educational attainment among individuals born just months apart. Using regression discontinuity methods, we confirm that the cohorts just affected by these changes completed significantly more education than slightly older cohorts subject to the old laws. However, we find little evidence that this additional education improved health outcomes or changed health behaviors…