Chapter 1: Effects of Reduced Community College Tuition on College Choices and Degree Completion. Recent efforts to increase college access concentrate on reducing tuition rates at community colleges, but researchers and policymakers alike have expressed concern that such reductions may not lead to long-run college completion gains. In this chapter, I use detailed data on students' college enrollment and completion outcomes to study how community college tuition rates affect students' outcomes across both public and private colleges. By exploiting spatial variation in tuition rates, I find that reducing tuition at a student's local community college by $1,000 increases enrollment at the college by 3.5 percentage points (18%) and reduces enrollment at non-local community colleges, for-profit institutions, and other private, vocationally-focused colleges, by 1.9 percentage points (15%). This shift in enrollment choices increases students' persistence in college, the number of credits they complete, and the probability that they transfer to and earn bachelor's degrees from four-year colleges. Chapter 2: Community College Program Choices in the Wake of Local Job Losses. Deciding which field to study is one of the most consequential decisions college students make, but most research on the topic focuses on students attending four-year colleges. In this chapter, I study the extent to which community college students' program choices respond to changes in local labor market conditions in related occupations. To do so, I exploit the prevalence of mass layoffs and plant closings across counties, industries, and time, and create occupation-specific layoff measures that align closely with community college programs. I find that declines in local employment deter students from entering closely related community college programs and instead induce them to enroll in other vocationally-oriented programs. Using data on occupational skill composition, I document that students predominantly shift enrollment between programs that require similar skills. These effects are strongest when layoffs occur in business, health, and law enforcement occupations, as well as when they take place in rural counties. Chapter 3: Do Health Insurance Mandates Spillover to Education? Evidence from Michigan's Autism Insurance Mandate (with Scott Imberman and Michael Lovenheim). Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation, but interaction effects could create spillovers to other public goods. In this paper, we examine how health insurance coverage affects the education of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the context of state-mandated private therapy coverage. Since Medicaid benefits under the mandate were far weaker than under private insurance, we proxy for Medicaid ineligibility and estimate effects via triple-differences. We find little evidence of an overall shift in ASD identification, but we do find substantial crowd-out of special education services for students with ASD from the mandate. The mandate led to increased mainstreaming of students in general education classrooms and a reduction in special education support services like teacher consultants. There is little evidence of changes in achievement, which supports our interpretation of the service reductions as crowd-out.
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