Multiple outcomes of education

For decades, pundits, politicians, college administrators, and academics have lamented the dismal rates of civic engagement among students who enroll in courses and eventually major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (i.e., STEM) fields. However, the research supporting this conclusion has faced distinct challenges in terms of data quality. Does STEM actually decrease the odds that young people will be actively involved in democracy? This paper assesses the relationship between studying STEM and voting.  To do so, we create a dataset of over 23 million students in the U.S. matched to national validated voting records.  The novel dataset is the largest known individual-level dataset in the U.S. connecting high school and college students to voting outcomes.  It also contains a rich set of demographic and academic variables, to account for many of the common issues related to students' selection into STEM coursework. We consider two measures of STEM participation ---Advanced Placement (AP) Exam taking in high school and college major. Using both measures, we find that, unconditionally, STEM students are slightly more likely to vote than their non-STEM peers.  After including the rich set of controls, the sign reverses and STEM students are slightly less likely to vote than their non-STEM peers. However, these estimated relationships between STEM and voting are small in magnitude---about the same effect size as a single get-out-the-vote mailer---and we can rule out even very modest causal effects of marginally more STEM coursework on voting for the typical STEM student.  We cannot rule out modest effects for a few subfields. Our analyses demonstrate that, on average, marginally more STEM coursework in high school and college does not contribute to the dismally low participation rates among young people in the U.S.

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Nearly all studies of preschool’s long-run effects examine means-tested programs; little is known about the long-run effects of universal programs. A number of key differences—including population served, scale, and counterfactual options—may cause universal programs to have different effects than previously studied means-tested programs. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I estimate the effects of Georgia’s first-in-the-nation statewide universal pre-K program on adult educational attainment and employment. The program made children 4.5 percent more likely to graduate from high school and 13.7 percent more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree (although the latter effect is imprecise). I find similar results in a supplemental analysis that uses the synthetic control method. I find no effects on associate degree attainment or employment.

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U.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet, little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to estimate the impacts of SRO placement. We construct this discontinuity based on the application scores for federal school based policing grants of linked police agencies. We find that SROs effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent gun-related incidents. We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspension, expulsion, police referral, and arrest of students. These increases in disciplinary and police actions are consistently largest for Black students, male students, and students with disabilities.

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To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at first-year college students placed on academic probation. Participants attend a workshop where coaches aim to normalize failure and improve self-confidence. Coaches also facilitate a process whereby participants reflect on their academic difficulties, devise solutions to address their challenges, and create an action plan. Participants then hold a one-time follow-up meeting with their coach or visit a campus resource. Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we show that the program raises students’ first-year GPA by 14.6% of a standard deviation, and decreases the probability of first-year dropout by 8.5 percentage points. Effects are concentrated among lower-income students who also experience a significant increase in the probability of graduating. Finally, using administrative data we provide the first evidence that coaching/mentoring may have substantial long-run effects as we document significant gains in lower-income students’ earnings 7–9 years following entry to the university. Our findings indicate that targeted, group coaching can be an effective way to improve marginal students’ academic and early career outcomes.

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In this descriptive study, we use longitudinal student-level administrative records from 4 cohorts of high school graduates in Kentucky to examine the extent to which students persist and attain post-secondary credentials in the CTE fields of concentration they choose in high school. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to use student-level administrative data to examine how different fields of concentration in high school CTE are related to future postsecondary outcomes. We find that concentrating in a particular CTE field in high school is associated with both continuing on with that same field in college and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field; this relationship is especially strong in health fields and especially for women in health. The secondary-postsecondary connection is the weakest among students concentrating in occupational fields in high school, who are also the most disadvantaged socioeconomically and academically before high school. Despite the existence of secondary-postsecondary pipelines of career interests, most students enroll and obtain credentials in fields that are different from the field of concentration in high school. In addition, relative to students with similar pre-high-school achievement as measured by grades and test scores, we find that CTE concentration in high school is strongly associated with being more likely to enroll in a two-year college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college.

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While a growing body of literature has documented the negative impacts of exclusionary punishments, such as suspensions, on academic outcomes, less is known about how teachers vary in disciplinary behaviors and the attendant impacts on students. We use administrative data from North Carolina elementary schools to examine the extent to which teachers vary in their use of referrals and investigate the impact of more punitive teachers on student attendance and achievement. We also estimate the effect of teachers' racial bias in the use of referrals on student outcomes. We find more punitive teachers increase student absenteeism and reduce student achievement. Moreover, more punitive teachers negatively affect the achievement of students who do not receive disciplinary sanctions from the teacher. Similarly, while teachers with racial bias in the use of referrals do not negatively affect academic outcomes for White students, they significantly increase absenteeism and reduce achievement for Black students. We find the negative effects of both more punitive and more biased teachers persist into middle school and beyond. The results suggest punitive disciplinary measures do not aid teachers in productively managing classrooms; rather, teachers taking more punitive stances may undermine student engagement and learning in both the short- and long- run. Furthermore, bias in teachers' referral usage contributes to inequities in student outcomes.

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To address the challenge of improving third grade reading comprehension, we developed and evaluated the long-term effects of a sustained content literacy intervention called the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), which emphasizes building domain and topic knowledge schemas from Grade 1 to Grade 3. The MORE intervention emphasizes thematic lessons that provide an intellectual framework for helping students connect new learning to a general schema (e.g., how scientists study past events, how systems function properly). Over three years, the treatment group students participated in (a) spring Grade 1 thematic content literacy lessons in science and social studies, (b) fall to spring Grade 2 thematic content literacy lessons in science, (c) remote Grade 3 thematic content literacy lessons in science, and (d) wide reading of thematically related informational texts in the summer months following Grade 1 and Grade 2. During the third grade school year (SY 2020-21), the COVID-19 pandemic required remote schooling to be in place from fall to spring and the Grade 3 MORE was provided to both treatment and control students. Accordingly, we examine long-term effects on third graders’ outcomes comparing a treatment group that received the Grade 1, Grade 2, and Grade 3 MORE treatment to a control condition that received the Grade 3 MORE treatment. Intent-to-treat estimates show that the students randomly assigned to the treatment condition outperformed control students in reading comprehension (ES = 0.11) and mathematics (ES = 0.14) on third grade state standardized assessments. Subgroup analyses also revealed positive impacts for student living in low- to moderate-socioeconomic status neighborhoods on both reading comprehension (ES = .13) and mathematics (ES = .20). Findings indicate that a sustained content literacy intervention may be a scalable approach for accelerating and equalizing third-graders’ reading comprehension and math outcomes.

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Despite decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of federal and state investment in policies to promote postsecondary educational attainment as a key lever for increasing the economic mobility of lower-income populations, research continues to show large and meaningful differences in the mid-career earnings of students from families in the bottom and top income quintiles. Prior research has not disentangled whether these disparities are due to differential sorting into colleges and majors, or due to barriers lower socioeconomic status (SES) graduates encounter during the college-to-career transition. Using linked individual-level higher education and Unemployment Insurance (UI) records for nearly a decade of students from the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), we compare the labor market outcomes of higher- and lower-SES community college graduates within the same college, program, and academic performance level. Our analyses show that, conditional on employment, lower-SES graduates earn nearly $500/quarter less than their higher-SES peers one year after graduation, relative to higher-SES graduate average of $10,846/quarter. The magnitude of this disparity persists through at least three years after graduation. Disparities are concentrated among non-Nursing programs, in which gaps persist seven years from graduation. Our results highlight the importance of greater focus on the college-to-career transition.

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Infant sex ratios that differ from the biological norm provide a measure of gender status inequality that is not susceptible to social desirability bias. Ratios may become less biased with educational expansion through reduced preference for male children. Alternatively, bias could increase with education through more access to sex-selective medical technologies. Using National Vital Statistics data on the population of live births in the U.S. 1969-2018, we examine trends in infant sex ratios by parental race/ethnicity, education, and birth parity over 5 decades. We find son-biased infant sex ratios among Chinese and Asian Indian births that persist in recent years and regressions suggest son-biased ratios among births to Filipino and Japanese mothers with less than high school education. Infant sex ratios are more balanced at higher levels of maternal education,  particularly when both parents are college educated. Results suggest greater equality of gender status with higher education in the U.S.

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We examine the dynamic nature of student-teacher match quality by studying the effect of having a teacher for more than one year. Using data from Tennessee and panel methods, we find that having a repeat teacher improves achievement and decreases absences, truancy, and suspensions. These results are robust to a range of tests for student and teacher sorting. High-achieving students benefit most academically and boys of color benefit most behaviorally. Effects increase with the share of repeat students in a class suggesting that classroom assignment policies intended to promote sustained student-teacher relationships such as looping may have even larger benefits.

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