Oil, Gas Boom and School Dropouts (‘The Wall Street Journal’)

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Wall Street Journal

The gas and oil boom in the United States helped the economy, but a recent Dartmouth study points to another consequence, writes The Wall Street Journal.

According to new research by Associate Professor of Economics Elizabeth Cascio and Ayushi Narayan ’14, the boom spurred many American men to drop out of high school, the Journal reports.

The newspaper notes that in a newly released paper, the researchers write that in the past 10 years, “the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has (quite literally) fueled a structural transformation of local economies across diverse swaths of the United States–from Pennsylvania to North Dakota–increasing local incomes and helping to set the U.S. on a path toward energy independence. We have also demonstrated that it has had the additional consequence of generating higher high school dropout rates among teenagers, particularly the young males whose employment prospects it has more greatly affected.”

Read the full story, published 7/14/15 by The Wall Street Journal. 

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