The devastating, immediate effects these shootings have on the physically injured victims are well documented and undeniable. But far less is known about the wider, long-term effects of these violent incidents on the well-being of student survivors.
“We need to broaden the lens when we think about the impact of gun violence in schools,” he says Molly Snellhealth economist and assistant professor of economics at Northwestern and strategy at Kellogg. Otherwise, we risk significantly underestimating the cost.”
To understand these long-term effects, Schnell conducted a comprehensive analysis of educational and economic data for students who attended Texas public schools where a shooting occurred. He partnered with a Northwestern associate Hannes Schwandt as well as Marica Cabral of the University of Texas at Austin, Bokyung Kim of the University of Connecticut and Maya Rosin-Slater of Stanford for the study.
The researchers found that school gun violence had clear and lasting repercussions, not only on students’ education in the months following a shooting, but also on their career prospects and earnings in the years after the shooting.
“You can envision that students are able to offset and make up for the effects on attendance and grade repetition in the long run,” says Schnell. “But what we’re finding is that these effects are not temporary and that they have lasting effects that, politically, we can’t really ignore.”
The tip of the iceberg
When Schnell and her colleagues began looking at how gun violence affected students and those in their community, they naturally turned to the mass shooting events that dominate the news cycle.
“But we realized that these headline events were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of school gun violence,” he says.
The rise of all types gun violence on US school grounds—not just mass shootings—prompted them to broaden the scope of their study to include nonfatal school shootings.
The researchers first looked at the impact of general school gun violence on students’ educational experience. They focused on students attending a Texas public school (K-12) where a shooting occurred during school hours between 1995 and 2016. They examined a total of 32 incidents.
They found that students who attended a school where a shooting occurred were more likely to miss school and fail a grade—relative to both their pre-shooting counterparts and similar students in schools where there was no shooting. These students were 12.5 percent more likely to be absent, 28.6 percent more likely to be chronically absent, and 110.7 percent more likely to repeat a grade.
Permanent consequences
The researchers then looked at the impact of school shootings on students’ post-secondary education and careers and earnings up to age 26.
They focused this long-term analysis on eight Texas public school shootings between 1998 and 2006. They compared the outcome of these students to the outcomes of both students who attended the same schools five years before the shooting and students who had similar characteristics but attended schools where there was no shooting.
Relative to these two groups of students, those exposed to a school shooting were less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to enroll in college, and less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 26. While these effects were true for students in all grade levels, they were particularly pronounced for those in grades 10-11 when the shooting occurred.
“By senior year, many students have already applied to college or gotten to college, and so you tend to see more subtle effects on long-term outcomes,” says Schnell. “It’s the same as first year in that they have more time to recover, whereas it seems to really affect people in second or junior year.”
More specifically, students who were in grades 10-11 at the time of a school shooting were 3.4% less likely to graduate from high school, 6.3% less likely to enroll in any college, 13.3% less likely to enroll in a four-year college, and 14.7% less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree.
In addition, affected students were less likely to be employed, and those who were employed earned less money.
Students who were in grades 9-11 when a shooting occurred, for example, were 3.8 percent less likely to be employed by age 24-26 and 5.6 percent less likely to be employed for at least one full year. And those who worked earned about 7.8 percent ($2,421) less annually.
These negative effects were seen in students across demographics such as gender and race and regardless of how much access they had to health professionals and school staff. But the impact was particularly strong among students who received free or reduced-price lunch and among non-Hispanic black students.
On average, researchers predict that school shootings result in a loss of $100,439 (in 2018 dollars) in the lifetime earnings of individual students.
“The effects on earnings are much larger than we would expect based on changes in academic performance alone, which suggests something broader is going on in terms of how affected students can function in a workplace,” says Schnell.
Although Schnell and her colleagues were unable to directly measure mental health among Texas students, they did show other research that fatal school shootings lead to large and persistent increases in antidepressant use among local youth, suggesting that mental health may play an important role in shaping long-term outcomes.
Our future workforce
In an ideal world, the answer to gun violence is prevention, but “if we live in a world where these events are going to continue to happen, schools and communities need to find a way to help mitigate the harm for survivors,” Schnell says.
One possible way to help students in school shootings may be to give them greater access to school health centers and resources. This could help normalize long-term mental health care for survivors while overcoming common barriers for students such as affordability and scheduling.
However, a further analysis found that schools mostly responded by hiring more assistant principals (up 19.9%), who are typically responsible for school safety and discipline. Schools did not, on average, bring in more health professionals to support students, while teacher and staff turnover rates increased.
“The response from the schools in our sample was to increase discipline rather than expand mental health support,” says Schnell.
Ultimately, failure to address these issues can have negative consequences not only on the lives of students and the communities involved, but also on the economy through reduced employment and earnings, according to the researchers.
“Overall, this shows the role we all have to play in prevention and mitigation [of gun violence]says Schnell. “The cost of these tragedies is great and extends far beyond those who are physically injured. We cannot ignore how gun violence in our schools affects the next generation and our future workforce.”
