Author: Steicy Lopez | Major: Economics | Semester: Fall 2024
The Switch
My name is Steicy Lopez and I am a senior studying Economics. I have had the pleasure of working with Dr. Gema Zamarro in the Education Reform department and receive honors college support for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025. I am pursuing graduate school or research positions in economics for my post-graduation plans.
After a summer internship learning about one of the pivotal figures in the school choice movement, Milton Friedman, and reflecting on my own experiences, I became curious about the effects of using market principles in educational systems. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a natural experiment that shocked the way parents made decisions about their children’s schooling. Many parents pursued untraditional options like remote learning that have left their mark on education. With Dr. Zamarro’s guidance, we have used a nationally representative panel data set to find determinants of transitions into different school types (public, private, homeschool, other). This research is not only relevant to public school systems to attempt to dissect the enrollment losses since the start of the pandemic but is also important to policy makers that are interested in systemic changes happening. After finding relationships with socioeconomic status, the growth of de-facto segregation in school mode could be concerning. Additionally, there remains an unexplained gap in administrative data that is theorized to be skipping kindergarten, truancy, or unreported homeschooling. Using survey data, we can understand more about non-enrollment and homeschooling enrollment.
One of the very first lessons I learned was the importance of persistence and outreach. After realizing school choice was a research interest for me, I searched for this data and talked to many professors that were skeptical of being able to obtain educational data. Given privacy restraints, educational data is known for its difficulty to obtain. This almost discouraged me from pursuing an educational topic. However, I met Dr. Zamarro at a research presentation just in time. She was able to provide guidance on a way to obtain this data and the industry knowledge to mentor this project. After attending several educational research presentations this semester, I learned that my experience was not unique and overcoming this access to data is often done through partnerships.
Along these lines, I realized early on there are a multitude of calls a researcher makes every step of the way. Cleaning the data itself can be a grueling process that requires you to think many steps ahead. Seemingly small decisions like how you define different racial/ethnic groups can have large effects on your results and leave opportunity for researchers bias to affect the analysis. When struggling with this, my mentor said, “Always think back to your research question and what you’re interested in finding out.” This gold nugget of knowledge has become something I come back to when making decisions. Even though I am constantly returning to these decisions, this has helped me gain some comfort and prompted me to return to existing literature for clarity. Additionally, noticing all these decisions a researcher makes has raised my awareness of research quality and has made me more equipped to dissect any research paper I read.
Overall, participating in research with the support of the Honors College has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my undergraduate career. Being pushed to learn so much about one topic while enjoying the excitement of “creating” new knowledge has motivated me to pursue a career in research.