College Readiness Assessment
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
This paper studies the impact of state reproductive rights laws on women’s human capital decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). Using data from the Common App, the undergraduate college admission application, I implement a difference-in-differences design that compares high-achieving women’s college choices to those of their male peers. I find that abortion bans caused a 2.7 percentage point decrease in the proportion of high-achieving women who applied to a school in one of the 13 states with a total ban. Effects were larger for applicants from states without a restriction on abortion, as well as for applicants from the most liberal counties in the United States. Further, treatment effects first emerged in the 2021-22 college application season after several Court actions suggested that it would overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) the following year, increased in magnitude in the 2022-23 college application season, and persisted in the 2023-24 college application season.
Keywords
Higher education, migration, economics of gender
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/84r6-8x28
