Essays on inference and education economics
Creators: name: Meiselman, Akiva Yonah
name: 0000-0003-3078-008X
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2022
Subjects: Inference
Clustering
Education
Community college
Developmental education
Regression discontinuity
High school
Discipline
Peer effects

description: This dissertation examines several policies in secondary and tertiary education and improves on existing methods of inference in settings that are salient for policy evaluation. In the first chapter, I propose a hypothesis test for clustered samples. This test is exact in samples with few clusters, few ever-treated clusters, cluster size outliers, or treatment intensity outliers; these features cause previous tests to over- or under-reject true hypotheses. I derive my test by inverting the distribution of the test statistic under a standard assumption about the errors, so that critical values can be selected from a distribution that matches the test statistic. I use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate where this adjustment is most impactful in achieving exact tests compared to previous hypothesis tests, and I apply my test to an empirical setting from the literature. The second chapter, previously published in Education Finance and Policy and co-authored with Lauren Schudde, examines the impact of a developmental education (dev-ed) reform for community colleges. Dev-ed aims to help students acquire knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college-level coursework. The traditional prerequisite approach to postsecondary dev-ed—where students take remedial courses that do not count toward a credential—appears to stymie progress toward a degree. At community colleges across the country, most students require remediation in math, creating a barrier to college-level credits under the traditional approach. Corequisite coursework is a structural reform that places students directly into a college-level course in the same term they receive dev-ed support. Using administrative data from Texas community colleges and a regression discontinuity design, we examine whether corequisite math improves student success compared with traditional prerequisite dev-ed. We find that corequisite math quickly improves student completion of math requirements without any obvious drawbacks, but students in corequisite math were not substantially closer to degree completion than their peers in traditional dev-ed after 3 years. The third chapter, coauthored with Anjali Priya Verma, examines students who were removed from their regular instructional environments for disciplinary reasons and sent to disciplinary schools. We study the long-run effects of disruptive peers on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. The existing literature documents that students who are removed from their regular instructional setting and placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in the highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals (5-8% per year); reduces their educational attainment--lower high-school graduation (6%), college enrollment (7%), and college graduation (17%); and worsens labor market outcomes--lower employment (2.5%) and earnings (6.5%). Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our paper draws attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposure to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectory.