Doctoral Dissertation Research: School Quality and Occupational Mobility in US Economic History

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The project proposes to build new datasets to study how school quality and accessibility interacted with occupational and geographic mobility in the early twentieth-century U.S. The context for the study entails both the "high school movement" and the transition from farming to service and manufacturing activities. Both movements were important events in the economic development of the United States, but their interplay at the household and individual-level is not very well documented. In particular, the responses of families to the high school movement and the implications of those responses for the children's long-run outcomes and for regional economic development are just starting to come into better focus. The proposed project will develop new micro-level evidence to better understand these issues in the South, a relatively poor region at the time, which subsequently narrowed the gaps in education and economic development relative to the rest of the U.S. The project seeks to answer the following questions:1) How did variation in high-school access and high-school quality affect the future earnings and occupational choice of southern students? 2) How did the expansion of southern high schools affect migration patterns? The main activity under the grant entails collecting a highly detailed dataset from recently discovered records in the Tennessee State Archives. High school principals were required to fill out detailed reports on their schools. Above and beyond common indicators such as the student-teacher ratio and length of the school year, these reports contain information on the faculty's education and the subjects that were taught at the school; information on school construction and the types of classrooms (e.g., labs); information on the library (if one existed); and information about the age and progression of students through grades. Taken together, this information allows a much richer characterization of school quality than normally available to researchers. There are sizable differences in high schools across locations in Tennessee in the mid-1920s, even after controlling for observable economic and demographic characteristics of the locations. Consequently, children from observationally similar backgrounds faced quite different schooling environments, especially when looking beyond the 8th grade level. This variation provides a basis for studying how people responded to the changing educational environment and for studying the long-run implications for those students as observed later in life at the time of the 1940 Census.