NEWS RELEASE 30-OCT-2023
Roe v. Wade repeal impacts where young women choose to go to college, PSU researcher finds
Peer-Reviewed PublicationPORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY
The impacts of Roe v. Wade's reversal in 2022 are still being understood, but new research from Portland State's Rajiv Sharma provides another piece of the puzzle.
Sharma found that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, female students are more likely to choose a university or college in states where abortion rights and access are upheld. The research, conducted with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, indicates a potential impact on future workforces and economic development in states with stricter abortion laws as young people often live and work in the state they go to college.
The research team is currently collecting data on first-year students who are part of the first class to apply to college in a post-Roe world. Sharma argues if the trend continues and college applicants to less selective institutions in states with limited abortion rights, the economic implications could be larger than initially discovered.
JOURNAL
Economics LettersDOI
10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111379METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysisSUBJECT OF RESEARCH
PeopleARTICLE TITLE
Anticipatory impacts of the repeal of Roe v. Wade on female college applicantsARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
1-Dec-2023Highlights
- •
In 2022, Roe v. Wade was challenged, introducing uncertainty into abortion access. - •
We compared college applicant shares between states upholding vs. banning access. - •
Ban state schools saw a 1 percentage point drop in the share of female applicants. - •
Female college applicants appear sensitive to state reproductive health policies. - •
This may impact the composition of colleges and their states’ future labor pools.
Abstract
We examined the relative impact of the anticipated repeal of Roe v. Wade on the share of female applicants to universities in states where abortion was banned compared with universities in states where abortion remained legal. Using the Common Data Sets from 71 of the top 100 institutions in the United States spanning 27 states from academic years 2018–2022, we found that there was a nearly one percentage point relative decrease in the share of female undergraduate applicants to institutions in ban states compared with states in which abortion remained legal. This suggests that undergraduate applicants are sensitive to state reproductive health policies and that this may impact the demographic composition of colleges and the future labor pool of the affected states.Keywords
Roe v. WadeDobbs
College choice
Abortion
JEL code
J161. Introduction
Each year, millions of American high school students and their families carefully weigh several factors in their decisions about where to apply to college (Cabrera and La Nasa, 2000, Hurtado et al., 1997, Kim, 2004, U.S. Department of Education 2019, U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, and National Center for Education Statistics 2019). State politics are increasingly a factor in college choice with one survey finding that one in four undergraduate applicants avoids entire states for political reasons (Goebel et al., 2023).By Fall 2021, some applicants for freshman admissions for the following academic year may have anticipated the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2022 ruling (Dobbs, 597 U.S.) that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion (Kolbert and Kay, 2021). This ruling effectively overturned Roe v. Wade (Wade, 1973), returning the power to regulate abortion to individual states (Planned Parenthood, 112 U.S.; Roe, 113 U.S.). In the years before the ruling, the ideological shift of the Supreme Court drove thirteen states to enact anticipatory trigger laws that would automatically ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned (Mason, 2021, Romanis, 2023). A number of other states already had pre-Roe abortion bans on the books. As a result, complete abortion bans took effect in much of the South, as well as parts of the Midwest and Southwest United States (Table 1). A number of partial bans restricted by weeks of gestational age also took effect, resulting in a total of eighteen states where abortion was fully or partially banned (The New York Times 2023).
Table 1. Abortion Status Post-Repeal.
| Abortion Legal Status | States Overall (In Sample is Underlined) |
|---|---|
| Banned | Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee,Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin,Georgia (6 Week), Arizona (15 Week), Florida (15/6 Week), Utah (8 Week), North Carolina (20 Week) |
| Ban Blocked | Indiana,Iowa, North Dakota, Montana, Ohio, Wyoming |
| Legal / Legal Limited | Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina,Virginia,District of Columbia,California,Colorado,Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland,Massachusetts,Michigan,Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania,Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington |
Note: Blocked bans and legal/legal limited comprised the control states.
With access to legal and safe abortion now restricted in much of the U.S., reproductive freedom may play a significant role in college choice in the coming application cycles. Recent Gallup polling found that 73% of unenrolled college-age adults state that reproductive laws are at least somewhat important when deciding whether to enroll in college (Marken and Hrynowski, 2023). This paper explores whether the share of female undergraduate applicants changed following the anticipated repeal of Roe v. Wade in states where abortion would be banned in comparison to states where abortion would remain legal. We find that states in which bans were reasonably anticipated to go into effect were associated with a nearly one percentage point relative decrease in the share of female undergraduate applicants in the fall 2022 freshman cohort.
2. Methods
2.1. Data
We utilized the Common Data Set (CDS), a higher education survey meant to aid students’ transition to higher education (College Board, Peterson's, and U.S. News and World Report 2023) that is published every academic year. Our research focused on applicant statistics for the most recent available five years (2018–2022). Under “First Time, First Year Admissions”, CDS statistics for each academic year include the numbers of male and female applicants. Using these data, we calculated the share of female freshman applicants for each institution for each year.We found the CDSs on the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS, 2023), where available, on university websites, or by asking universities directly for these data. We referenced the 2022–2023 US News Best National University Rankings and included the universities listed in their top 100 ranking (Report, U.S. News and World 2023). This gave us a sample of 104 universities due to ties in the ranking from which we assembled a complete five year dataset for 71 universities across 21 states.
We categorized the universities into three groups based on state laws regarding abortion from the New York Times abortion tracker as of June 2023 (The New York Times 2023). There were 18 states where abortion was banned and six more where the ban was blocked with the remainder retaining legal abortion access. We compared the outcomes for universities in states where abortion became illegal (treatment group), pre-, and post-Roe-v-Wade repeal, against outcomes for those in states where abortion access continued after Roe-v-Wade's repeal (control group). We included the ban-blocked group as control states, although results are similar if they are excluded from the sample. For schools within the top 100 US News Best National University Rankings, this yielded eight treated states and 19 control states, including D.C. (Table 1).
2.2. Empirical approach
Our estimation regression included fixed effect controls for school, school year, and school state. Our base specification is as follows
1)Yijt=∑t=−3+1(αijt*Repealj*Year(t))+τt+δi+φj+εijtwhere i is school, j is state, and t is school year, αijt is a vector of estimates for the relative impact of being in a ban state compared to a control state for a given year relative to 2021 (i.e., immediately prior to repeal becoming widely anticipated). As for the controls, τt captures school year fixed effects, δi captures school fixed effects which control for time-invariant differences, φj accounts for state fixed effects, and εijt is an error term clustered on school.Anticipatory impacts of the repeal of Roe v. Wade on female college applicants
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176523004044/pdfft?md5=bef2c6907283d707b0ce159f413b2ac3&pid=1-s2.0-S0165176523004044-main.pdf
