The Effect of Abortion Bans on College Decisions

• In Event: Gender and Opportunity in Higher Education and Work

Abstract

In June of 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States returned the ability to ban abortion to individual states in their Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Since then, Kane (2024) finds that fewer high-achieving women are applying to colleges in states that banned abortion using data from the Common App. Motivated by this and reports that abortion laws influence prospective students' college decisions, we ask how the abortion bans that followed the Dobbs decision impacted student, faculty, and university decisions around enrollment and hiring. We consider the possibility first that while application behavior may change, actual enrollment may not if those students never would have attended particular schools anyway. Second, schools may adjust admissions practices to maintain the size of their student body and persuade students to continue to enroll. Third, we explore whether these bans impact the faculty in similar ways.This work considers how changing abortion laws and access to reproductive rights have become a factor in not only college choice, but also contribute to changing institutional admission practices. Prior work considering college choice has focused on price, institutional attributes, distance students must travel, quality, future earnings, socioeconomic characteristics of students, and institutional image. Institutions of higher education may need to prepare for policy changes, such as those related to gay marriage and immigration, and consider how this will affect potential students and their own practices. We use the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics. We focus on a balanced panel of four-year, public and private, non-profit institutions from 2016 to 2024 and gather data on undergraduate applications, admissions, yield, enrollment, financial aid, exam scores, faculty body, and hiring. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we find that schools in states that banned abortion see no change in female enrollment but accept students with lower standardized test scores, particularly in math, compared to schools without such bans after 2023, the first year applicants could have responded to the ban. Similarly, we do not see substantial changes in the number of female new hires.We further investigate how the timing of the ban in the summer of 2022, between academic years, and the fact that the case was announced and then leaked earlier, could impact the results. We also differentiate between complete and partial bans and explore whether the enrollment behavior changes differently for students coming from no-ban states. Finally, we explore other changes in admissions behavior, such as increasing institutional aid, other employee impacts such as staff hiring and departures, and whether the impacts differ depending on the strength of the institution or the tightness of the academic labor market.

Author

• Dana Jezierny Smith, College of the Holy Cross
  Presenting Author