The Effect of Job Displacement on College Enrollment: Evidence from Ohio

Veronica Minaya, Brendan Moore and Judith Scott-Clayton

No 27694, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Displaced workers suffer large and persistent earnings losses. These losses can be mitigated by returning to school, yet the extent to which such workers enroll in post-secondary education in response to displacement is poorly understood. Using employer-employee-student matched administrative data from Ohio, we provide the first direct evidence of workers’ enrollment responses following mass layoffs in the United States. Close to 10% of these displaced workers enroll in public two- or four-year colleges after displacement, with the typical enrollment persisting for five semesters and 29% completing a degree. However, much of this enrollment may have occurred regardless of the displacement. To estimate a causal effect, we compare displaced workers over time to similar non-displaced workers. We estimate that for every 100 displaced workers, only about 1 is ever induced to enroll in a public college as a result. This effect is concentrated almost entirely among displaced manufacturing workers, who enroll at a rate of 2.5 per every 100. Such workers with lower within-firm earnings and from local labor markets with limited for-profit college options are the most likely to enroll in public institutions.

JEL-codes: I23 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Veronica Minaya & Brendan Moore & Judith Scott-Clayton, 2023. "The effect of job displacement on public college enrollment: Evidence from Ohio," Economics of Education Review, vol 92.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27694.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27694

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27694

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().