The education level of disabled veterans greatly affects their children’s schooling
There is an elaborate bureaucracy in the United States to assist disabled veterans in a variety of ways. In Rochester and more generally in Monroe County, New York, there are several organizations that seek to assist disabled veterans with things like job training, health and wellness, and legal counseling.
It is now well understood that relative to the children of able bodied parents, the children of disabled parents tend to perform worse in terms of both educational and health outcomes. But what happens when we focus exclusively on parents who are both disabled and veterans? How is the education of such children affected? Intuitively, one would think that the effect would be negative. Is this correct and, if yes, then does this negative effect depend on some other attribute of a disabled veteran? In the past, we generally had no credible, data-driven answers to these questions.
However, interesting new research sheds light on the above questions. This research utilizes data from the American Community Survey from 2008 to 2019 and looks at all the children between the ages of 5 and 18 who live with a disabled, veteran father. The focus is on fathers and not mothers because there is insufficient data with which to conduct meaningful econometric analysis. The extent of the father’s disability is measured with the service-connected disability rating (SCDR) which computes the severity of disabilities stemming from military service. The SCDR runs from a low of 0 percent to a high of 100 percent.
It turns out that in order to comprehend the educational impacts on children, it is important to divide disabled veteran fathers into two categories depending on their level of education. Children whose fathers completed less than four years of college are in the “less educated” group. Conversely, the children of fathers who have completed at least four years of college are in the “more educated” group.
For the two groups of children, the research looks at private school attendance to measure schooling investment by fathers in their children. Why private school? Because there is evidence to show that children attending private schools tend to obtain higher test scores and they also display higher high school graduation and college attendance rates. Put differently, private school attendance is indicative of higher investment in schooling.
The analysis comes up with several salient findings. For instance, children are far less likely to attend private school when their veteran fathers are disabled. That said, this “far less likely” result applies with greater force to the children of more educated fathers. In other words, from a schooling perspective, the children of more educated fathers lose more than the children of less educated fathers. In addition, these adverse schooling effects for the children of more educated fathers persist into young adulthood in the form of diminished mobility.
What is going on here? Note that sending a child to a private school is a costly investment. Therefore, lost earnings are one possible way through which a father’s disability can affect his child’s private school attendance. Because more educated fathers are likely to have higher earning potential, lost earnings are very likely to be higher for this group if a disability precludes fathers from being employed. In this regard, the research shows that relative to household income per capita for the less educated group, this same metric falls further for the more educated group at every level of the father’s disability or SCDR.
Finally, disability-related payments from the Veterans Affairs Department increase with a father’s disability for both less and more educated fathers but these payments are indexed only to the SCDR and not related to lost earnings. Hence, although these payments typically offset the lost earnings of less educated, disabled fathers, they do not do so for more educated, disabled fathers.
In sum, we have a rare instance in which, from a schooling perspective and in relative terms, the child of a disabled but more educated father is worse off than the child of a disabled but less educated father.
