Research

Working Papers

• Raising state minimum wages, lowering community college enrollment (with Diane Schanzenbach and Sarah Turner)  

  • • Review of Economics and Statistics  While the direct impacts of minimum wage changes on employment have received considerable attention, these policy changes have the potential to impact skill attainment by changing the opportunity cost of college enrollment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students at public two-year institutions in response to increases in the minimum wage. The largest enrollment effects are seen for those students who are enrolled in part-time courses of study at community colleges. The effect of minimum wage changes on credential attainment is limited to modest effects for women at the associate degree level, suggesting that the changes primarily impact the enrollment of students who are unlikely to have been diverted from degree attainment.

• Theoretical Foundations of the Minimum Wage and Post-Secondary Investment  (draft available upon request)

  • • This paper studies the relationship between state-level minimum wage changes and post-secondary investment decisions. Whereas existing literature presents conflicting evidence on enrollment responses across two- and four-year institutions, I present a unifying framework with which to make sense of these effects. Building on canonical models of human capital investment, this paper explores the potential of the minimum wage to impact college enrollment decisions by shifting both the wage premium and the opportunity cost associated with post-secondary investment. Using national post-secondary enrollment data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and wage data from the Community Population Survey (CPS), I show that the extent to which these parameters are shifted by the changing minimum wage is a function of prevailing wage distributions in the year before a minimum wage change occurs and, specifically, who is bound by the new minimum wage. Guided by my theoretical framework, I use variation in state-level minimum wage changes to size the determinants of enrollment responses to individual changes across years and states. I show that states in which higher shares of high school graduates are bound by the minimum wage are those most likely to experience large enrollment declines at community colleges in response to an increasing minimum wage. Finally, I use my framework to consolidate conflicting estimates from the existing literature.

    • Presented at: IZA Summer School (Berlin, July 2023)

Selected Works in Progress

• Accessible Higher Education and Outside Options  with Carl Gergs

  • What impact do outside option values have on higher education enrollment decisions? We explore this important question using the case study of Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) in Germany (comparable to US community colleges). To this end, we exploit the fact that wages paid during apprenticeships, the immediate outside option to UAS degrees, are a by-product of collective bargaining negotiations at the sector-industry level and thus quasi-exogenous with respect to UAS enrolment in a given region and subject area. Mapping sectors to UAS degrees, we then leverage variation in sectoral apprenticeship wage floors to measure individual’s sensitivity to changes in the opportunity cost of UAS enrolment. 

• Bachelor's degrees at community colleges: An interview study of student decision-making