This Time Really Is Different: The Effect of COVID-19 on Independent K-12 School Enrollments

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a severe economic recession in 2020. Historically, during economic recessions, there have been large declines in independent (private) school enrollments in the United States. Thus, it would be expected that the American independent school sector would have experienced significant enrollment declines between fall 2019 and fall 2020. But this time was different. In our sample, 70% of independent schools experienced increases in enrollment or level enrollments during the Pandemic Recession. In our multiple regression analyses, the main driver of this beneficial change in enrollments for independent schools was whether the public school districts that served their home county were open for only virtual instruction to start the 2020–21 academic year. We find suggestive evidence that a higher prevalence of county-level COVID-19, measured as deaths per capita, was associated with higher independent school enrollments as well. Economic conditions do not appear to have played a major role in changes in independent school enrollments.

KEYWORDS:

• Independent school enrollment
• COVID-19
• Economic crisis
• Instructional modality

Notes

1. These employment figures were tabulated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021).

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. As another example, independent school enrollments also declined significantly between 2001 and 2003, while public school enrollments increased. While not the focus of this paper, some independent school families may switch to homeschooling during economic downturns as well.

5. There is a significant and growing proportion of independent school students who have at least some of their cost of attendance paid by taxpayers through education choice programs. According to EdChoice, as of 2020, there were 1.28 million students who received an average of $2,805 in taxpayer support to defray the cost of their independent school education – which translates to 11.6% of independent school students and 1% of all school-aged children (EdChoice, 2020).

6. The variation in income may be idiosyncratic to a specific family or broad-based across the community as would be likely in a recession.

7. In the language of microeconomic theory, U(.) and V(.) are direct and indirect utility functions. See for example, Varian (1992). The superscript on V(.) does not denote a different value function, but rather reports if the optimal choice included a public or independent school. To simplify our analysis, we assume prices of other consumption (R) is fixed so its presence in V(.) is implicit.

8. Technically, the independent school could reduce their effective price (increased “discounting”) in response to a recession to provide some partial offset to the effect of failing income. However, the offset would not be complete unless one assumes that the demand for independent education is perfectly elastic or the supply is perfectly inelastic – neither of which is likely the case.

9. For almost all of our sample, one public school district served each county. For states that had more than one public school district serving the county, we used the data for the largest public school district in our analysis. Using other reasonable approaches to coding learning modalities for nearby public schools did not change our point estimates or statistical significance of key variables in any important way – that is, effect sizes and significance levels were essentially unchanged.

10. The source of these data on COVID-19 cases and deaths per county for August 2020 were retrieved from USA FACTS (www.usafacts.org). USA FACTS was created by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide more transparency about the American population and governments at the federal, state, and local levels. USA FACTS partners with Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University to provide the data available on their website.

11. Establishments are single physical locations where individuals are employed. Therefore, a given business firm may encompass more than one establishment. For example, if a given grocery store chain has two stores at separate locations within a given county, that would be counted as two establishments. Each of these three economic variables were pulled from: Employment private employers, Private establishments, Average weekly wage private employers, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/cew

12. To maximize our survey response rate, we did not ask respondents their exact enrollments for fall 2019. The maximum tuition level in the sample of $63,250 is a boarding school whose tuition fee is inclusive of room and board.