From Community to Commencement: Analyzing the Correlation between Social Capital Variables and Graduation Rates among United States High Schools

Abstract

How do the strength and interconnectedness of a community influence the education outcomes of students growing up within such a community? In this paper, I employ two novel measures of social capital--Economic Connectedness and Social Clustering, created and detailed in Chetty et al. (2022)--to study their relationship with graduation rates at the high school level. Economic Connectedness and Social Clustering measure the degree to which low and high socioeconomic individuals are friends with one another and the degree to which social networks are intertwined in a community, respectively. These variables are constructed using Facebook friendships from May, 2022 (Chetty et al. 2022). Controlling for well-known indicators of educational success, such as median parent income and student demographics, I run regressions between graduation rates and my two variables of interest. My results shows that a one standard-deviation increase in economic connectedness is associated with a 2.46 percentage point increase in graduation rates when including controls and state fixed effects in the model. An analogous increase in social clustering is associated with a 1.13 percentage point increase in graduation rates when including the same controls and fixed effects. These increases are substantial as they represent a minimum of 7.5 percent of the gap between the national average graduation rate (87 percent) and a perfect 100 percent rate. These results support increasing socioeconomic diversity and community strength in school districts to improve education outcomes in the US.