Jesús Villero

We describe alignment between high school career and technical education (CTE) and local labor markets across five states—Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Tennessee, and Washington. We find that CTE is partially aligned with local labor markets. A 10-percentage-point higher share of local jobs related to a CTE career cluster is associated with a 3-point higher rate of CTE concentration in that cluster. Women and students from racial or ethnic minority groups are better aligned with local employment than men, in part due to their selection of CTE fields like Education & Training, Health Science, and Hospitality & Tourism, which correspond with a large portion of the workforce in almost every metro area. We find more limited evidence of dynamic, short-term adjustments in CTE after changes in local labor markets. A small degree of realignment lags the labor market by two-to-three years and is only observed following changes in college-level employment.

We study the effects of an increase in post-secondary educational opportunities on teen fertility by exploiting policy-induced variation from Ser Pilo Paga (SPP), a generous college financial aid program in Colombia that dramatically expanded college opportunities for low-income students. Our preferred empirical approach uses a triple difference design that leverages variation in the share of female students eligible for the program across municipalities and the fact that the introduction of SPP should not affect the education and fertility decisions of older women not targeted by the program. We find that after the introduction of SPP, fertility rates for women aged 15-19 years old decreased in more affected municipalities by about 6 percent relative to less affected municipalities. This effect accounts for approximately one-fourth of the overall decrease in teen fertility observed in the years following the program's announcement. Our results suggest that increasing economic opportunities through expanding college access can contribute to lowering teen fertility rates.

High school students in Career and Technical Education (CTE) select concentration areas that map to almost every occupation in the modern U.S. economy. Some fields have much higher potential earnings than others. We study CTE enrollment patterns across four states and one large metro area to assess if potential pay arising from students' CTE fields foreshadows longstanding inequities in the labor market. We find that women concentrate in fields linked to jobs with 7-20% lower pay, a range that includes the actual U.S. gender pay gap. We also find evidence of disparities in potential pay by race, ethnicity, family income, and disability identification, although these are much smaller and less consistent across locations than the gender gap.

We study the effects of an increase in the generosity of income-driven repayment (IDR) plans on net tuition (tuition less school-provided financial aid) using policy-induced variation from the introduction of the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) repayment plan in 2012. We estimate future wages and the present value of loan repayment savings based on student SAT score, college, major, gender, race, parents' income, and other attributes. Using a triple difference framework, we find that selective colleges increase their net tuition to capture about $42 for every $100 in potential loan repayment savings; this effect is statistically insignificant and negligible for non-selective colleges. As an application, we estimate that President Biden's proposed SAVE plan would effectively transfer about $23 billion to selective colleges over the next 10-year budget window.

We document an increase of more than five percentage points in the employment rate gap between women with a college degree and women without a college degree over the last two decades, mainly driven by a sustained increase in employment among college-educated women with young children. We argue that differential patterns in motherhood child penalties are behind these trends, with child penalties in employment and earnings decreasing faster for women with college degrees since the mid-2010s. Exploiting cross-state variation in the share of jobs with telework potential in the early 2000s, we find that child penalties for college-educated women decreased more in states with more employment in teleworkable occupations. We confirm this finding by leveraging individual-level occupational data and calculating child penalties for mothers in teleworkable and non-teleworkable occupations within a given education level. Child penalties decreased by more for women in teleworkable occupations, which are disproportionally held by women with college degrees.