Search Results
Journal Article
Custom Comparison Groups in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System
This Economic Commentary studies the behavior of colleges when they are asked to list a set of comparison group colleges in annual data reporting for the US Department of Education but are given little direction on how to do so. I find that, relative to themselves, colleges tend to list for comparison colleges that are more selective, are larger, and have better resources. One possible interpretation of these findings is that colleges overestimate where they stand relative to others, although an alternative interpretation is that colleges have accurate views but list comparison institutions ...
Journal Article
Trends in Employment at US Colleges and Universities, 1987–2013
This Economic Commentary studies employment at colleges and universities in the United States between 1987 and 2013. Some of the results from this analysis are in line with conventional wisdom. For example, I document that a declining proportion of faculty are full-time employees. On the other hand, some of the results are counter to popular belief. For example, I find that the share of college employees who are executives, administrators, or managers has not changed appreciably over time.
Working Paper
Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation
A number of states have recently prohibited the use of affirmative action in admissions to public universities statewide. A growing body of research suggests that these affirmative action bans reduce minority enrollment at selective colleges while leaving overall minority college enrollment rates unchanged. The effect of these bans on racial segregation across colleges has not yet been estimated directly and is theoretically ambiguous due to a U-shaped relationship between minority enrollment and college selectivity. This paper uses variation in the timing of affirmative action bans across ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Tobacco-Free School Laws on Student and Staff Smoking Behavior
A number of US states have enacted bans on tobacco use by students, staff, and visitors anywhere on the grounds of public elementary and secondary schools statewide. These laws are intended to reduce tobacco use, reduce exposure to secondhand smoke, reinforce anti-tobacco curricula taught in schools, and prevent children from viewing their teachers and fellow students using tobacco products. We examine the impact that the laws have on the smoking behavior of students, teachers, and other school staff by estimating difference-in-differences models that exploit the time variation in adoption of ...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and Education: An Updated Survey of the Research
This Economic Commentary surveys research on COVID-19 in relation to education in the United States. It is a companion to an earlier survey (Hinrichs, 2021) and focuses on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic that might persist even after life has returned to a relative normal. The evidence suggests that the pandemic led to lower enrollment at public schools and negatively impacted student learning. In addition, teacher turnover did not rise at the beginning of the pandemic, but it has risen in the years since.
Working Paper
Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation
Prior research suggests that statewide affirmative action bans reduce minority enrollment at selective colleges while leaving overall minority college enrollment unchanged. However, the effect of these bans on across-college racial segregation has not yet been estimated. This effect is theoretically ambiguous due to a U-shaped relationship across colleges between minority enrollment and college selectivity. This paper uses variation in the timing of affirmative action bans across states to estimate their effects on racial segregation as measured by standard exposure and dissimilarity indexes, ...
Working Paper
State Appropriations and Employment at Higher Education Institutions
his paper studies the impacts of state appropriations on staffing and salaries at public higher education institutions in the United States using employment and revenue data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, along with an instrumental variables strategy borrowed from Deming and Walters (2018) and Chakrabarti, Gorton, and Lovenheim (2020). The instrument sidesteps the potential endogeneity of state appropriations for a given institution in a given year by interacting an institution’s historical reliance on state appropriations with total state appropriations for all ...
Working Paper
What Kind of Teachers Are Schools Looking For? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
Teacher quality is a pressing public policy concern, yet there is little evidence on what types of teachers schools actually prefer to hire. This paper reports the results of an experiment that involved sending schools fictitious resumes with randomly-chosen characteristics in an attempt to determine what characteristics schools value when hiring new teachers. The results of the study suggest that an applicant?s academic background has little impact on the likelihood of success at private and charter schools, although public schools respond more favorably to candidates from more selective ...
Working Paper
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Segregation in Higher Education
This descriptive paper documents how segregation between blacks and whites across colleges in the United States has evolved since the 1960s. It also explores potential channels through which changes are occurring, and it uses recent data to study the issue of segregation within colleges. The main findings are as follows: (1) White exposure to blacks has been rising since the 1960s, whereas black exposure to whites increased sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has fluctuated since then. Meanwhile, black-white dissimilarity and the Theil index fell sharply in the late 1960s and early ...
Journal Article
Trends in Expenditures by US Colleges and Universities, 1987-2013
This Economic Commentary studies trends in spending by US colleges and universities in broad expenditure categories between 1987 and 2013. The results reveal that spending per student has risen in most major spending categories. This is true for both public institutions and private institutions. However, spending has risen more dramatically in some categories than others. For example, research is one category that has witnessed among the highest spending growth, and in percentage terms, there has also been a large increase in student services spending.