Browsing by Subject "Educational choice"
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Item The Affordable Care Act and college enrollment decisions(Towson University. Department of Economics, 2016) Jung, Juergen; Shrestha, Vinish; Towson University. Department of EconomicsWe investigate the effect of the extension of the federal dependent coverage man- date for young adults under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the college enrollment decisions of young Americans. The ACA removes the conditionality that young indi- viduals need to be enrolled as full-time students in order to be able to remain on their parents’ health insurance past the age of 18 and extends the coverage mandate to age 26 irrespective of student status. This expansion of the coverage mandate changes the incentives for the full-time and part-time college enrollment decisions of young individ- uals. We use panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for the years 2003–2013 and estimate that the dependent coverage expansion under the ACA decreases the probability to enroll as full-time student by 2 to 3 percentage points. Furthermore we find that part-time college enrollment is unaffected by the new policy. The results from a difference-in-differences model are robust to changes in the model specification and become stronger when we increase the sample overlap between treatment and control groups using trimming based on propensity scores.Item Does the availability of parental health insurance affect the college enrollment decision of young Americans?(Towson University. Department of Economics, 2010-06) Hall, Diane M. Harnek; Jung, Juergen; Rhoads, Thomas; Towson University. Department of EconomicsThe present study examines whether the college enrollment decision of young individuals (student full-time, student part-time, non-student) depends on health insurance coverage via a parent’s family health plan. Our findings indicate that the availability of parental health insurance has significant effects on the probability that a young individual enrolls as a full-time student. A young individual who has access to health insurance via a parent is up to 22 percent more likely to enroll as a full-time student than an individual without parental health insurance. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity this probability drops to 5.5-6.5 percent but is still highly significant. We also find that the marginal effect of the availability of parental health insurance has a larger effect on older students between ages 21-23. We provide a brief discussion about possible implications of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 in this context.