PIER Public Seminar Video Archive

Overview
As election day quickly approaches, local voters are considering Massachusetts Ballot Question 2, a measure that would repeal the requirement that students earn a passing score on tenth-grade Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams to graduate high school.

Supporters of the ballot measure argue that the changes will help address inequities in graduation outcomes and free teachers to focus less on test prep and more on knowledge and skills not captured by standardized exams. Obtaining a diploma would depend on meeting each school district’s local academic standards and course requirements instead of passing the MCAS tests.

Opponents argue that this change would undermine the effectiveness of the MCAS as a tool for measuring student progress and lead to uneven and inequitable expectations for student success across the state’s more than 300 school districts.

Host: Martin West, Academic Dean and Shattuck Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Speaker: John Papay, Associate Professor of Education and Economics and Director of Annenberg Institute, Brown University

Panelists

• Mary Bourque, Executive Director, Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents
• Max Page, President, Massachusetts Teachers Association
• Patrick Tutwiler, Secretary of Education, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

*Due to a technical issue, there is no recording of this seminar; please reach out to Steve Hemelt directly if you would like more information on the talk*
 

Abstract: How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure-track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.

Joint work with Johnathan G. Conzelmann (UNC Chapel Hill), Brad J. Hershbein (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research), Shawn Martin (Cornerstone Research), Andrew Simon (University of Chicago and ANU RSE), Kevin M. Stange (University of Michigan)

Text-Based Mentoring for Postpartum Mothers:
Impacts and Lessons from a Mixed-Methods Randomized Trial