Poster #91 - Abortion bans and college student decisions: How the Dobbs supreme court ruling affects enrollment.

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization supreme court ruling allowed states to restrict abortion access, something that had been protected nationwide for decades. Following the Dobbs decision, multiple states enacted full or partial bans on abortion: 13 states enacted full bans, and another eight enacted bans based on gestational term limits. My research examines how these abortion bans affect college enrollment, highlighting intersectional effects based on the geographic, socioeconomic, and political characteristics of students' home residences. Identifying whose college decisions are shaped by these bans reveals who has the capacity to respond – and who may be most vulnerable. The implications of these enrollment responses will underscore interconnections between existing inequities and injustices in the US higher education and healthcare systems.

I examine whether enrollment is affected by the ban status of both the college’s state and the student’s home state, seeing if these effects vary by the characteristics of students’ home counties and zip-codes. Specifically, I explore questions such as: Are abortion bans causing fewer female students from access states to enroll at colleges in ban states? Are students who live on borders to access states more or less likely to enroll in those neighboring states? Do students from areas with different socioeconomic characteristics – such as income, poverty, educational attainment, or political leanings – respond differently to bans? To investigate these questions, I employ two-way fixed effects models using three custom enrollment extracts from the National Student Clearinghouse, each one aggregated by the state and sector of the institution and the students’ home state, county, or zip-code, respectively. Using detailed zip-code geographic, socioeconomic, and political characteristics, I can (a) predict which students were most and least likely to migrate out-of-state for college prior to Dobbs to identify highly mobile students whose enrollment decisions may be more affected; (b) use distance-from-state-border spatial analysis to examine enrollment behavior changes for students who can more easily opt into states with abortion access, giving extra attention to more highly contentious reproductive healthcare settings; and (c) investigate how different subgroups of students are differentially affected by bans, including by average income, poverty rates, educational attainment, and within-state political leanings. These findings have multiple implications for longer-term impacts on the education investments of certain populations, as well as potential changes in future local labor supplies.

Initial findings using the state data reveal female enrollment increases relative to male enrollment at public four-year institutions in access states, with further findings suggesting these enrollment effects are driven by out-of-state female students and, more specifically, out-of-state female students who are coming from ban states. Zip-code and county-level data then provide the granularity needed to further investigate these suggestive findings, expanding upon and addressing limitations of the state-level analysis. Ultimately, exploring reproductive healthcare access as a contributing factor to student decision making is not only important for understanding the full consequences of abortion bans, but also how non-education-based policy decisions can directly affect higher education investments.

Author

• Tia Jane Monahan, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author