Higher education decision on covid-19 vaccine mandate

ABSTRACT

Higher education institutions (HEIs) had a public health decision to make in fall 2021, whether or not to mandate a Covid-19 vaccine for all students. The aim of this paper is to study the factors that influence the student vaccine mandate decision. We employ a logistic regression with the dependent variable equal 1 if a HEI has a student mandate; 0 otherwise. We hypothesize that the student vaccine mandate decision is influenced by an institution’s ranking, type, enrolment, competition, and political landscape. The results are consistent with expectations. Our significant finding is that top-ranked HEIs are more likely to have a vaccine mandate, with the probability of a vaccine mandate declining as the ranking declines. HEIs below those top-ranked are concerned about the financial implications of mandating vaccines, and this concern is heightened when students have alternatives. A national standard for a higher education vaccine mandate will internalize the positive externalities associated with a Covid-19 vaccine mandate, and overcome the reluctance of some HEIs to implement a vaccine mandate.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19 pandemic
• higher-education
• vaccine mandate

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I18
• I29
• D62

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We randomly selected schools not in the Chronicle database to check their website for vaccine mandate. None of the schools had a vaccine mandate.

² Our results are robust to alternative dependent variables (e.g. employees AND students, students only, and employees only) and are available upon request.

³ This is unsurprising since all HEIs know by August that Covid-19 cases are high.

⁴ Matching vaccine decision date with Covid-19 cases is difficult because the Chronicle only records the initial date of any mandate decision, such as only residential students, not the comprehensive student mandate decision.

⁵ Results are robust to alternate political variables (e.g. % voting Republican in the 2020 presidential election).