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Dave E. Marcotte

Dave E. Marcotte, Taylor Delaney.

How have changes in the costs of enrolling for full-time study at public 2-year and 4-year colleges have affected the decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? We exploit local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public 4-year colleges to study the impact of public higher education costs on the postsecondary enrollment decisions of high school graduates over three decades. We model prospective students’ decisions about whether to attend community college, a public 4-year university in their state of residence, other colleges, or no college at all as relative costs change. Unlike institutional analyses, our contribution is not to model how enrollment changes at a particular college or type of college as costs change. But, we draw from the institutional literature to help identify enrollment impacts by instrumenting college costs using policy variation imposed by state appropriations and tuition caps. We estimate that in counties where local community college tuition doubled (about average for the study period), the likelihood of post-secondary enrollment fell by about 0.06, on a mean of about 0.80. In addition to reducing college enrollment overall, rising costs at community colleges diverted other students to 4-year colleges. Rising relative costs of 4-year public colleges similarly diverted some students toward community colleges, but did not limit college attendance in the aggregate. We also find evidence of endogeneity in cost setting at the institution level. Our preferred estimates rely on a control function approach that instruments intertemporal changes in institutional costs using state and local appropriations and state policies to restrict tuition growth.

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Kari Dalane, Dave E. Marcotte.

The segregation of students by socioeconomic status has been on the rise in American public education between schools during the past several decades. Recent work has demonstrated that segregation is also increasing within schools at the classroom level. In this paper, we contribute to our understanding of the determinants of this increase in socioeconomic segregation within schools. We assess whether growth in the presence and number of nearby charter schools have affected the segregation of socioeconomically disadvantaged students by classroom in traditional public schools (TPS). Using data from North Carolina, we estimate a series of models exploit variation in the number and location of charter schools over time between 2007 and 2014 to estimate the impact of charter school penetration and proximity on levels of within school segregation in TPS classrooms serving grades 3-8. We find that socioeconomic segregation in math and English language arts increase in grades 3-6 when additional charter schools open within large urban districts. We find the largest impacts on schools that are closest to the new charter schools. We estimate that the impact of charter schools can account for almost half of the overall growth in socioeconomic segregation we see over the course of the panel within grades 3-6 in large urban districts.

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Kari Dalane, Dave E. Marcotte.

Over the past three decades, children from low-income families and those from more affluent families have increasingly been attending different public schools. While recent work has helped us understand patterns of income segregation between districts and schools within districts, we know very little about segregation of students as they experience school: in the classroom. In this paper, we attempt to advance knowledge of trends in the segregation of students by income at the classroom level. We make use of detailed, student-level administrative data from North Carolina which provides a measure of a student’s free/reduced price lunch eligibility, which we refer to as economically disadvantaged (ED) status, along with information on classroom assignments. Since we know the ED status of each student in each classroom, we assess whether ED students are assigned to classes in the same pattern as other students or if are clustered/segregated into different classrooms. We know very little about the magnitude of income-based segregation, and almost nothing about whether this has changed over time, so we provide novel evidence on the question of whether segregation of students by socioeconomic status has increased within schools. We find that within-school segregation has risen by about 10 percent between 2007 and 2014 in elementary and middle schools we study. Further, we find that segregation of ED students within schools is correlated with the level of segregation between schools in districts, and this relationship grew stronger over our panel.

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