The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

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

Abstract

Introduction
Faculty sexual misconduct targeted at students is a widespread problem. The consequences of such incidents include direct harm to victims and may also entail a loss to science if students who encounter misconduct become discouraged from continuing their studies in their chosen field. Changing academic fields potentially increases time to degree and the costs of higher education, and can decrease the likelihood of degree completion (Yue 2017; Liu 2021). Further, an academic field change, especially one that aligns with gendered norms, can contribute to academic field-based gender segregation and exacerbate wage differentials between men and women. 

Purpose
This paper measures the overall response to public reports of faculty gender-based misconduct with respect to in-field degree completion. We also estimate how shifts in major could affect predicted earnings. 

Data
We link publicly available information on degree completion by institution, academic field, and gender from IPEDS to the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database (ASMD), a database of faculty sexual misconduct incidents verified in the media or court cases. To measure predicted earnings, we link majors and institutions to information on major-specific lifetime earnings (Webber 2018) and major-institution-specific 5-year postgraduation earnings from the College Scorecard. 

Design
We employ a stacked event study approach to document the extent to which faculty sexual misconduct decreases in-field degree completion. The event study approach accounts for trends in degree completion by institution, academic field, and over time. Constructing a comparison group for each report of an incident and stacking the resultant datasets prevents bias from heterogeneity in exposure response over time.  

Results
We find that exposure to reports of faculty sexual misconduct does little to change institution-level outcomes such as application or enrollment. However, this lack of an institution-level response disguises a within-institution response. Exposure to a field-specific faculty sexual misconduct public report decreases degree completion in that field by 4.7 percent four years after the incident. This decline is driven by incidents occurring after 2015, which approximately corresponds to the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Among these more recent incidents, we observe a 7 percent decline in in-field degree completion. Further, degree completion in majors dominated by men declines post-exposure by 3.9 percentage points in the recent time period, driven by larger changes among men. However, the shift in major has little impact on predicted earnings. This is because students shift out of both high-paying fields (such as STEM) and low-paying fields (such as arts). 

Conclusions
This paper contributes to our understanding of how sexual misconduct affects higher education. Most related research focuses on either institution-related outcomes or the impact on faculty perpetrators. In this paper, we refocus the investigation of “scandal'' responses by examining field-specific consequences for students, a shift that allows more thorough consideration of the potential for reported misconduct to negatively affect students in the long run. Our paper also contributes to the literature on major choice by showing how experiences with sexual harassment within a department, whether direct or indirect, influence students' major choices.

Author

• Katherine Leu, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author