Inter-district Open Enrollment: An Examination of its Effects on Private School Enrollment in Wisconsin
Mentor 1
Dr. David Welsch
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
24-4-2015 2:30 PM
End Date
24-4-2015 3:45 PM
Description
Knowing what affects or does not affect private school enrollment could assist educational policy makers when making decisions regarding the allocation of funds in their respective programs. Private schools in the United States have provided an alternative to a student’s traditional public school option by offering a range of different academic and extra-curricular opportunities. Prior literature has noted an existing trend of declining private school enrollment (Aud et al., 2011), but has not yet been examined in great detail. To address this question I obtained a panel dataset from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and used a fixed effect regression to estimate the effects of inter-district open enrollment on private school enrollment while controlling for a number of school-district characteristics. Initial OLS estimates find that, on average, the number of students transferring out of a school district increase the number of students enrolled in private schools in that district. Once fixed effects are used that coefficient is no longer statistically significant.
Inter-district Open Enrollment: An Examination of its Effects on Private School Enrollment in Wisconsin
Union Wisconsin Room
Knowing what affects or does not affect private school enrollment could assist educational policy makers when making decisions regarding the allocation of funds in their respective programs. Private schools in the United States have provided an alternative to a student’s traditional public school option by offering a range of different academic and extra-curricular opportunities. Prior literature has noted an existing trend of declining private school enrollment (Aud et al., 2011), but has not yet been examined in great detail. To address this question I obtained a panel dataset from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and used a fixed effect regression to estimate the effects of inter-district open enrollment on private school enrollment while controlling for a number of school-district characteristics. Initial OLS estimates find that, on average, the number of students transferring out of a school district increase the number of students enrolled in private schools in that district. Once fixed effects are used that coefficient is no longer statistically significant.
