I’m running about a day behind on my Inside Higher Ed commentary because the ongoing search has made this a Week From Hell, but there was an interesting news item yesterday about an economic study suggesting that health care subsidies would improve education more than tuition credits:
The study’s bottom line finding, in the authors’ words, is that “health plays an extremely important role in determining an individual’s educational attainment. On average, having been sick before the age of 21 decreases [an individual’s average educational attainment] by 1.4 years.”
(I assume that “sick” here means something more serious than seasonal colds or allergies. At least, I sure hope so…)
The bit that I’m really curious about, though, is the next paragraph:
To gauge the logical policy implications of their findings, the authors ran two experiments on a pool of 8,000 individuals aimed at assessing the impact of two possible subsidies: a $2,100 per year college tuition subsidy (available to all who attend college) and a $778 a year subsidy for health expenditures made for four years to all 16-year-olds who attend high school. The overall costs of the two subsidies were the same.
They find that the health expenditure subsidy is more effective, increasing the highest level of educational attainment by 20-25% more than the tuition subsidy. Which is an interesting result.
I’m curious, though, as to what is meant by “experiment” in this context. They can’t really have handed out $16 million to a bunch of college-bound students and tracked the results for fifteen years. At least, I would find that really hard to believe. At the same time, though, this seems like a difficult thing to get from a computer model. So I’m puzzled…
The abstract of the paper in question doesn’t shed any light, referring only to “policy experiments.” I don’t have free access to this from home, and I don’t have time to read it at work, but if somebody knows what the deal is, here, I’d love to know.
Maybe we should find a hard-rockin’ economist, and get them to do a “Basic Concepts” post defining “policy experiment” for us…