Julie Edmunds, Fatih Unlu, Brian Phillips, Christine Mulhern, Bryan C. Hutchins
Abstract Recent policy efforts have attempted to increase the number of dual enrollment courses offered within Career and Technical Education pathways and there is evidence to suggest that this practice is widespread. However, there is very little research on student participation in CTE dual enrollment and on its impacts. This study examines participation in the CTE dual enrollment pathway in North Carolina, finding that about 9% of North Carolina students participated in CTE dual enrollment courses in 11th or 12th grade and disparities in participation among subgroups were less than for college transfer dual enrollment courses. Using a propensity-score weighing approach that compared outcomes for participating students with a weighted group of non-participants, the study found that participation in CTE dual enrollment was positively associated with college credits earned in high school, graduation from high school, and overall enrollment in college within one year after high school. The study also examined results by subgroup.
{"title":"CTE-Focused Dual Enrollment: Participation and Outcomes","authors":"Julie Edmunds, Fatih Unlu, Brian Phillips, Christine Mulhern, Bryan C. Hutchins","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00414","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent policy efforts have attempted to increase the number of dual enrollment courses offered within Career and Technical Education pathways and there is evidence to suggest that this practice is widespread. However, there is very little research on student participation in CTE dual enrollment and on its impacts. This study examines participation in the CTE dual enrollment pathway in North Carolina, finding that about 9% of North Carolina students participated in CTE dual enrollment courses in 11th or 12th grade and disparities in participation among subgroups were less than for college transfer dual enrollment courses. Using a propensity-score weighing approach that compared outcomes for participating students with a weighted group of non-participants, the study found that participation in CTE dual enrollment was positively associated with college credits earned in high school, graduation from high school, and overall enrollment in college within one year after high school. The study also examined results by subgroup.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136363203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Racial segregation can occur not only between schools but also within schools, and there has been particular concern that gifted & talented (G&T) programs may increase within-school segregation at the primary school level. This paper evaluates the contribution of gifted & talented education to racial segregation using data on the presence and racial composition of G&T programs at virtually all U.S. elementary schools over a span of nine school years. I first show that, consistent with widespread perceptions, G&T programs do disproportionately enroll white and Asian students while Black, Hispanic and Native American students are underrepresented. Next, I calculate the changes in the Dissimilarity and Exposure Indices that occur when G&T programs are treated as fully separate schools, which provides a transparent measure of their contribution to overall racial segregation. These calculations indicate that accounting for the within-school racial sorting caused by G&T education increases the Dissimilarity Index by 10-20%, and has little to no impact on the Exposure Index. Finally, to study the potential effects of G&T programs on enrollments over time, I estimate event study models for schools initiating or discontinuing G&T programs, and find no large changes in white or Asian enrollment after programs are eliminated or initiated. I conclude that G&T education's impact on racial segregation in U.S. elementary schools is modest, although changes in G&T programming could still be one meaningful tool to increase integration.
{"title":"Gifted and Talented Programs and Racial Segregation","authors":"Owen Thompson","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00415","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Racial segregation can occur not only between schools but also within schools, and there has been particular concern that gifted & talented (G&T) programs may increase within-school segregation at the primary school level. This paper evaluates the contribution of gifted & talented education to racial segregation using data on the presence and racial composition of G&T programs at virtually all U.S. elementary schools over a span of nine school years. I first show that, consistent with widespread perceptions, G&T programs do disproportionately enroll white and Asian students while Black, Hispanic and Native American students are underrepresented. Next, I calculate the changes in the Dissimilarity and Exposure Indices that occur when G&T programs are treated as fully separate schools, which provides a transparent measure of their contribution to overall racial segregation. These calculations indicate that accounting for the within-school racial sorting caused by G&T education increases the Dissimilarity Index by 10-20%, and has little to no impact on the Exposure Index. Finally, to study the potential effects of G&T programs on enrollments over time, I estimate event study models for schools initiating or discontinuing G&T programs, and find no large changes in white or Asian enrollment after programs are eliminated or initiated. I conclude that G&T education's impact on racial segregation in U.S. elementary schools is modest, although changes in G&T programming could still be one meaningful tool to increase integration.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136363409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract School districts in the United States often borrow on the municipal bond market to pay for capital projects. Districts serving economically disadvantaged communities tend to receive lower credit ratings and pay higher interest rates. To remedy this problem, 24 states have established credit enhancement programs that promise to repay district debt when a district cannot do so, thereby enhancing the district's credit rating. With a generalized difference-in-differences approach, I rely on cross- and within-district variations to estimate the effect of state enhancement on district bond interest rate, per-pupil capital spending, and student performance. State enhancement reduces district bond interest rates by 6% and increases per-student capital spending by 2% to 7%. It also reduces the disparity in the interest rate and capital spending across districts serving lower- and higher-income families, with no discernible effect on test scores. I find no evidence that the amount of enhanced school debt is associated with significant changes in interest rates paid by state governments. Districts in states without such programs could have achieved cost savings in the range of $383 million to $1 billion from 2009 to 2019 had the states adopted similar programs.
{"title":"School District Borrowing and Capital Spending: The Effectiveness of State Credit Enhancement","authors":"Lang (Kate) Yang","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00413","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract School districts in the United States often borrow on the municipal bond market to pay for capital projects. Districts serving economically disadvantaged communities tend to receive lower credit ratings and pay higher interest rates. To remedy this problem, 24 states have established credit enhancement programs that promise to repay district debt when a district cannot do so, thereby enhancing the district's credit rating. With a generalized difference-in-differences approach, I rely on cross- and within-district variations to estimate the effect of state enhancement on district bond interest rate, per-pupil capital spending, and student performance. State enhancement reduces district bond interest rates by 6% and increases per-student capital spending by 2% to 7%. It also reduces the disparity in the interest rate and capital spending across districts serving lower- and higher-income families, with no discernible effect on test scores. I find no evidence that the amount of enhanced school debt is associated with significant changes in interest rates paid by state governments. Districts in states without such programs could have achieved cost savings in the range of $383 million to $1 billion from 2009 to 2019 had the states adopted similar programs.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136363198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper estimates the causal effects of enrollment in one of five oversubscribed high-quality Los Angeles charter schools using a lottery design. Enrolling in a charter school increased 11th-grade standardized test scores and enrollment and persistence in four-year colleges substantially, but had no effect on high school GPA. Charter students took more advanced coursework, were less likely to skip class, were more likely to apply to a four-year college, and reported more teacher support for college-going. The increase in four-year persistence appears to be driven by more enrollment and persistence in University of California (UC) campuses, which have higher graduation rates than the likely alternatives. This suggests that the effects of charter schools could depend on the availability of high graduation rate colleges.
{"title":"The Effects of Charter High Schools on Academic Achievement and College Enrollment: Evidence from Los Angeles","authors":"Sarah J. Reber, Dennis Rünger, Mitchell D. Wong","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00411","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper estimates the causal effects of enrollment in one of five oversubscribed high-quality Los Angeles charter schools using a lottery design. Enrolling in a charter school increased 11th-grade standardized test scores and enrollment and persistence in four-year colleges substantially, but had no effect on high school GPA. Charter students took more advanced coursework, were less likely to skip class, were more likely to apply to a four-year college, and reported more teacher support for college-going. The increase in four-year persistence appears to be driven by more enrollment and persistence in University of California (UC) campuses, which have higher graduation rates than the likely alternatives. This suggests that the effects of charter schools could depend on the availability of high graduation rate colleges.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135602554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract State and local government decisions about how school funding is raised and allocated have profound impacts on American public education, and in recent years, experts have documented large increases in one type of spending in particular: public pensions. Because most data on school district pension expenditures are at the state level, it has so far been difficult to assess what changes local school districts have made in response. In this article, I analyze a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of approximately 200 unified school districts across the United States from 2005 to 2016. Consistent with findings in the literature, I find that pension expenditures rose in real terms in most of them, but also that there has been significant variation in that growth. Moreover, in a descriptive analysis, I find that larger within-district pension expenditure growth is associated with 1) greater revenue growth in the subsequent year and 2) reductions in school district employment, mainly through reductions in the number of non-teaching staff. Finally, there is evidence that districts' responses to rising pension expenditures may depend on state political institutions, in particular whether the states have mandatory collective bargaining for teachers.
{"title":"Public Schools and Their Pensions: How Is Pension Spending Affecting U.S. School Districts?","authors":"Sarah F. Anzia","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00412","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract State and local government decisions about how school funding is raised and allocated have profound impacts on American public education, and in recent years, experts have documented large increases in one type of spending in particular: public pensions. Because most data on school district pension expenditures are at the state level, it has so far been difficult to assess what changes local school districts have made in response. In this article, I analyze a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of approximately 200 unified school districts across the United States from 2005 to 2016. Consistent with findings in the literature, I find that pension expenditures rose in real terms in most of them, but also that there has been significant variation in that growth. Moreover, in a descriptive analysis, I find that larger within-district pension expenditure growth is associated with 1) greater revenue growth in the subsequent year and 2) reductions in school district employment, mainly through reductions in the number of non-teaching staff. Finally, there is evidence that districts' responses to rising pension expenditures may depend on state political institutions, in particular whether the states have mandatory collective bargaining for teachers.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135602555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Todd Hall, Isabelle Fares, Anna J. Markowitz, Kate Miller-Bains, Daphna Bassok
Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.3% smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely drives turnover in ECE, there is relatively little large-scale evidence on the link between compensation and staffing challenges. We summarize the limited pre-pandemic evidence and use pandemic-era data from 90% of publicly funded child care centers in Louisiana to describe the relationship between sites' compensation and staffing challenges. In October 2022, 15% of centers' lead teacher positions were unfilled—nearly quadruple the 4% national vacancy rate for public school teachers. Of centers with any vacancies or hires in the past six months, 65% turned families away and 84% hired less experienced or qualified teachers than desired due to staffing challenges. Centers with higher wages were significantly less likely to report staffing challenges, turn families away, and hire less experienced teachers, after controlling for center characteristics and region. Our findings and prior evidence suggest that wage increases are promising for stabilizing the child care workforce.
{"title":"Compensation and Staffing Challenges in Child Care: Statewide Evidence from Pandemic Relief Applications","authors":"Todd Hall, Isabelle Fares, Anna J. Markowitz, Kate Miller-Bains, Daphna Bassok","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00410","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.3% smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely drives turnover in ECE, there is relatively little large-scale evidence on the link between compensation and staffing challenges. We summarize the limited pre-pandemic evidence and use pandemic-era data from 90% of publicly funded child care centers in Louisiana to describe the relationship between sites' compensation and staffing challenges. In October 2022, 15% of centers' lead teacher positions were unfilled—nearly quadruple the 4% national vacancy rate for public school teachers. Of centers with any vacancies or hires in the past six months, 65% turned families away and 84% hired less experienced or qualified teachers than desired due to staffing challenges. Centers with higher wages were significantly less likely to report staffing challenges, turn families away, and hire less experienced teachers, after controlling for center characteristics and region. Our findings and prior evidence suggest that wage increases are promising for stabilizing the child care workforce.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45108684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We estimate the effect of universal free school meal access through the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) on child BMI. Through the CEP, schools with high percentages of students qualified for free or reduced-priced meals can offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. With administrative data from a large school district in Georgia, we use student-level BMI measures from the FitnessGram to compare within-student outcomes before and after CEP implementation across eligible and non-eligible schools. We find one year of CEP exposure increased expected BMI percentile by about 0.085 standard deviations, equivalent to a nearly 1.88-pound weight increase for a student of average height. We also find that the program led to a small increase in the likelihood of overweight and limited evidence of a small decrease in the likelihood of underweight. We do not find that the program increased student obesity risk. Examining the effects of CEP on child BMI by grade suggests that the overall effect is largely driven by students in middle schools, highlighting potential heterogeneity in the program's impact across grades. The findings of this paper are relevant for researchers and policymakers concerned with the effects of universal free school meals on student health.
{"title":"The Effect of Universal Free School Meals on Child BMI","authors":"W. Davis, Daniel Kreisman, Tareena Musaddiq","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00409","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We estimate the effect of universal free school meal access through the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) on child BMI. Through the CEP, schools with high percentages of students qualified for free or reduced-priced meals can offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. With administrative data from a large school district in Georgia, we use student-level BMI measures from the FitnessGram to compare within-student outcomes before and after CEP implementation across eligible and non-eligible schools. We find one year of CEP exposure increased expected BMI percentile by about 0.085 standard deviations, equivalent to a nearly 1.88-pound weight increase for a student of average height. We also find that the program led to a small increase in the likelihood of overweight and limited evidence of a small decrease in the likelihood of underweight. We do not find that the program increased student obesity risk. Examining the effects of CEP on child BMI by grade suggests that the overall effect is largely driven by students in middle schools, highlighting potential heterogeneity in the program's impact across grades. The findings of this paper are relevant for researchers and policymakers concerned with the effects of universal free school meals on student health.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42400443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What can the federal government do to help ensure that the public schools attended by children living in poverty have enough resources to serve their students? In this brief, we describe existing federal efforts to support education spending in high-poverty districts, discuss their limitations, and suggest alternative approaches for federal policy. We focus especially on the Education Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) formula—a part of the compensatory Title I grant program designed to encourage changes to state school finance policy—and show that the incentives embedded in the formula are in fact negligible; revising the formula to be more effective would be difficult. Further, any attempt to incentivize desirable state policy faces a fundamental trade-off: such policy can reinforce inequality because districts in states that do not respond to the incentives by adopting desirable policies also do not receive (as much) federal funding. We argue that federal policy should be more attentive to state fiscal capacity because it is an important determinant of district-level school spending, and the federal government is uniquely positioned to address between-state inequality.
{"title":"Funding High-Poverty School Districts: Federal Policy Tools and the Limits of Incentives","authors":"N. Gordon, Sarah J. Reber","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00408","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What can the federal government do to help ensure that the public schools attended by children living in poverty have enough resources to serve their students? In this brief, we describe existing federal efforts to support education spending in high-poverty districts, discuss their limitations, and suggest alternative approaches for federal policy. We focus especially on the Education Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) formula—a part of the compensatory Title I grant program designed to encourage changes to state school finance policy—and show that the incentives embedded in the formula are in fact negligible; revising the formula to be more effective would be difficult. Further, any attempt to incentivize desirable state policy faces a fundamental trade-off: such policy can reinforce inequality because districts in states that do not respond to the incentives by adopting desirable policies also do not receive (as much) federal funding. We argue that federal policy should be more attentive to state fiscal capacity because it is an important determinant of district-level school spending, and the federal government is uniquely positioned to address between-state inequality.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48336257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Instructional coaching is an attractive alternative to one-size-fits-all teacher training and development in part because it is purposefully differentiated: programming is aligned to individual teachers' needs and implemented by an individual coach. But, how much of the benefit of coaching as an instructional improvement model depends on the specific coach with whom a teacher works? Collaborating with a national teacher training and development organization, TNTP, we find substantial variability in effectiveness across coaches in terms of changes in pre-service teachers' instructional practice (roughly 0.25 to 0.3 standard deviations from our preferred sample and models). The magnitude of coach effectiveness heterogeneity is quite similar to average coaching program effects on teaching practice identified in other research. Through a set of alternative model specifications and permutation tests, we rule out the possibility that our estimates of coach effectiveness heterogeneity are driven by nonrandom sorting of coaches to teachers, at least on observable characteristics available in our data, as well as the possibility that these estimates are simply statistical noise. These findings suggest that identifying, recruiting, and supporting highly skilled coaches will be key to scaling instructional coaching programs.
{"title":"Instructional Coaching Personnel and Program Scalability","authors":"David Blazar, Douglas McNamara, Genine L. Blue","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00407","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Instructional coaching is an attractive alternative to one-size-fits-all teacher training and development in part because it is purposefully differentiated: programming is aligned to individual teachers' needs and implemented by an individual coach. But, how much of the benefit of coaching as an instructional improvement model depends on the specific coach with whom a teacher works? Collaborating with a national teacher training and development organization, TNTP, we find substantial variability in effectiveness across coaches in terms of changes in pre-service teachers' instructional practice (roughly 0.25 to 0.3 standard deviations from our preferred sample and models). The magnitude of coach effectiveness heterogeneity is quite similar to average coaching program effects on teaching practice identified in other research. Through a set of alternative model specifications and permutation tests, we rule out the possibility that our estimates of coach effectiveness heterogeneity are driven by nonrandom sorting of coaches to teachers, at least on observable characteristics available in our data, as well as the possibility that these estimates are simply statistical noise. These findings suggest that identifying, recruiting, and supporting highly skilled coaches will be key to scaling instructional coaching programs.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48484588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With growing demand for workers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and healthcare, it is important to assess not only whether education interventions impact educational attainment, but also students' majors. This study examines the impact of Early College High Schools (ECHSs) on Bachelor's degree attainment by field of study using data on 400,000 students from North Carolina (7,300 in an ECHS). Using propensity score weighting, I find ECHSs increase Bachelor's attainment within 10 years of high school entry by 4.7 percentage points (19% over baseline), with STEM degree attainment increasing by 1.3 to 2.4 points (18% to 34%). However, within STEM and STEM-related fields, ECHSs increase degrees in the natural sciences (1.3 points or 45%), math/computer science (0.6 points or 60%), and psychology (1.2 points or 57%), but have null and directionally negative effects on engineering (-0.1 points or -7%) and healthcare (-0.3 points or -17%). Patterns are generally similar across student subgroups, though males drive increases in computer science/mathematics while females and white students drive decreases in healthcare. Thus, ECHSs increase STEM degree attainment overall, but more research is needed to examine whether intensive dual-enrollment experiences like the ECHS may create barriers or disincentives to pursuing certain STEM fields.
{"title":"The Effect of Early College High Schools on STEM Bachelor's degree attainment: Evidence from North Carolina","authors":"T. Swiderski","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00404","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 With growing demand for workers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and healthcare, it is important to assess not only whether education interventions impact educational attainment, but also students' majors. This study examines the impact of Early College High Schools (ECHSs) on Bachelor's degree attainment by field of study using data on 400,000 students from North Carolina (7,300 in an ECHS). Using propensity score weighting, I find ECHSs increase Bachelor's attainment within 10 years of high school entry by 4.7 percentage points (19% over baseline), with STEM degree attainment increasing by 1.3 to 2.4 points (18% to 34%). However, within STEM and STEM-related fields, ECHSs increase degrees in the natural sciences (1.3 points or 45%), math/computer science (0.6 points or 60%), and psychology (1.2 points or 57%), but have null and directionally negative effects on engineering (-0.1 points or -7%) and healthcare (-0.3 points or -17%). Patterns are generally similar across student subgroups, though males drive increases in computer science/mathematics while females and white students drive decreases in healthcare. Thus, ECHSs increase STEM degree attainment overall, but more research is needed to examine whether intensive dual-enrollment experiences like the ECHS may create barriers or disincentives to pursuing certain STEM fields.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46662642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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