Gun Violence on College Campuses and its Impact on Institutional Outcomes

• In Event: College Choice in Broader Social, Political, and Legal Context

Abstract

This paper examines how campus gun violence affects higher education institutions’ outcomes. I construct a novel institution-year panel by linking data on gun violence incidents occurring on U.S. college campuses to administrative data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The incident data combines information from multiple sources to capture both fatal and nonfatal campus shootings across a broad range of institutions, allowing the analysis to move beyond the small number of highly publicized mass shootings that have dominated prior research.

To estimate the effects of these incidents on applications, admissions, enrollment, and student retention, I use an event-study design that accommodates staggered treatment timing, heterogeneous effects, and multiple incidents within institutions.

Preliminary results show no evidence that campus gun violence affects applications, admissions, or admission rates in the full sample, and the pretrend tests do not indicate differential trends before treatment. By contrast, enrollment declines significantly after an incident, especially among women, with effects that are both persistent and increasing over time. Overall and full-time enrollment fall by roughly 5-6% in the first year after an incident and by about 12-15% three years later. These declines are driven in part by in-state students, whose enrollment falls by about 4.5% in the first year and 9% in the second year after an incident. In the full sample, I find no significant effects on SAT/ACT score distributions or first-year retention rates.

Heterogeneity analyses, however, reveal important differences across institutions. Small institutions experience persistent declines in applications, admissions, and retention, although the application and admission results should be interpreted with caution, given some evidence of pretrends. Very competitive institutions, by contrast, show increases in admissions alongside declines in the math profile of incoming cohorts, suggesting adjustments in academic preparedness rather than enrollment margins. Retention effects are concentrated among private and small institutions, which appear less able to absorb the consequences of these shocks.

This paper contributes to a small but growing literature on institutional shocks in higher education by providing one of the first large-scale analyses of how campus gun violence shapes colleges’ outcomes. It also highlights important differences in how institutions absorb safety-related shocks, showing that some campuses are more vulnerable than others. More broadly, the findings demonstrate that campus gun violence can have meaningful downstream consequences for colleges, particularly through enrollment-related channels, underscoring how broader forms of social violence can shape higher education trajectories and institutional stability.

Author

• Cecilia Rodriguez Ingold, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author