How Do Parents Choose Schools? The Importance of Nonacademic Wellbeing and the Demand for Peers

Abstract

The composition of peers (i.e., the types of students enrolled at a school) is known to exert a strong influence on parents’ school choices, with important implications for the incentives that school choice programs create for schools. In this paper we document an important source of this demand for peer composition: parents’ concerns about nonacademic dimensions of their child's wellbeing, such as safety and friendships. First, focusing on an urban school district and linking new survey data on parents beliefs about schools to administrative data on their school choices, we show that parents have strong preferences for schools they believe will enhance their child’s nonacademic wellbeing. If anything, these preferences are stronger than their preferences for schools they believe will promote their child’s academic outcomes. Second, investigating the relationship between beliefs and peer composition, we show that beliefs about nonacademic wellbeing respond strongly to peer composition - much more so than beliefs about academics. Since it may be difficult to separate nonacademic wellbeing and peer composition in the minds of parents, our findings underline the challenge posed by peer composition to the effective operation of school choice programs.