Volume 30, Number 4 (Fall) 1995
Betts, Julian R., and Laurel L. McFarland. 1995. "Safe Port in a Storm: The Impact of Labor Market Conditions on Community College Enrollments." Journal of Human Resources 30(4):741-765.
The paper examines the impact of the business cycle on enrollments and finances at individual community colleges between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s. We find that 1 percent increases in the unemployment rates of recent high school graduates and of all adults are associated with rises in full-time attendance of about 0.5 percent and 4 percent respectively. Part-time enrollment exhibits similar anticyclical patterns. This link carries over in large part to degrees obtained. In contrast, state and local appropriations per student are procyclical. We interpret this funding pattern as a failure to integrate education policy sufficiently closely with labor market policy.
Julian R. Betts is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-San Diego. Laurel L. McFarland is a Researcher at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. This article is based on a paper prepared for the "Is There a National Policy Interest in Subbaccalaureate Education?" session at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and management research conference, October 31, 1992. The authors would like to thank Charles Hornbrook and Marc Rysman at the Brookings Institution and Shinichi Sakata, Randy Silvers, and Klaus Zauner at UCSD for research assistance. The following people at the U.S. Dept. of education and the National Science Foundation provided valuable assistance: Kristin Keogh and Fabrizio Galino. We would also like to thank Henry Aaron, George Borjas, Enid Jones, Jane Sjogren, two anonymous referees, and participants in seminars at UCSD, RAND, and the 1993 meetings of the Western Economics Association. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in June 1996 through June 1999 from the authors: Department of economics, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, California, 92093-0508.
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