The Enduring Cost of Gun Violence at School

The devastating, direct consequences these shootings have on the victims who were physically harmed are well-documented and undeniable. But much less is known about the broader, long-lasting effects of these violent incidents on the well-being of the surviving students.  

“We need to broaden the lens when thinking about the impact of gun violence at schools,” says Molly Schnell, a health economist and an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern and strategy at Kellogg. “Or we risk significantly underestimating the costs.”   

To understand these long-term impacts, Schnell conducted a comprehensive analysis of educational and economic data for students who attended Texas public schools where a shooting took place. She collaborated with Northwestern colleague Hannes Schwandt as well as Marika Cabral of the University of Texas at Austin, Bokyung Kim of the University of Connecticut, and Maya Rossin-Slater of Stanford for the study. 

The researchers found that gun violence at school had clear and lasting reverberations, not just on students’ education in the months following a shooting but also on their career prospects and earnings in the years after it occurred.    

“You might envision that students are able to compensate and make up for impacts on attendance and grade repetition in the long run,” Schnell says. “But what we’re discovering is that these effects are not temporary and that they have lasting implications, which, from a policy perspective, we really can’t ignore.”   

Tip of the iceberg    

When Schnell and her colleagues started looking into how gun violence affected students and those in their community, they naturally turned to the mass-shooting events that dominate news cycles.   

“But we realized that these headline-grabbing events were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of gun violence at school,” she says.   

The rise of all types of violence involving guns on school grounds in the U.S.—not just mass shootings—motivated them to widen the scope of their study to include school shootings that did not involve a death.    

The researchers first examined the impact of general gun violence at school on students’ educational experience. They focused on students who attended a Texas public school (Kindergarten–twelfth grade) where a shooting took place during school hours between1995 and 2016; they examined 32 incidents in all.   

They found that students who attended a school where a shooting occurred were more likely to miss school and to fail a grade—relative both to themselves before the shooting and to similar students at schools where no shooting took place. 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.    

Lasting consequences   

Next, the researchers examined the impact of school shootings on students’ post-high-school education and on their professional career and earnings through the age of 26.   

They centered this longer-term analysis on eight shootings at Texas public high schools between 1998 and 2006. They compared the outcome of these students with the outcomes of both students who attended the same schools five years prior to the shooting and students who had similar characteristics but attended schools where no shooting took place. 

Relative to these two groups of students, those who were exposed to a school shooting were less likely to graduate high school, less likely to enroll in a college, and less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree by the time they were 26. Though these effects applied to students across all grade levels, they were particularly strong for those who were in grades 10–11 when the shooting occurred.    

“By senior year, a lot of students have already applied to college or gotten into college, and so you tend to see more-muted impacts on long-run outcomes,” Schnell says. “It’s the same with freshman year in that they have more time to rebound, whereas it really seems to affect people in their sophomore or junior years.”    

To be specific, students who were in grades 10–11 at the time of a school shooting were 3.4 percent less likely to graduate high school, 6.3 percent less likely to enroll in any college, 13.3 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college, and 14.7 percent less likely to get a bachelor’s degree.   

What’s more, the 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 the time they were 24–26 years old and 5.6 percent less likely to be employed for at least a full year. And those who did work earned about 7.8 percent ($2,421) less per year.   

These negative effects were observed in students across individual demographics such as gender and race and regardless of how much access they had to health professionals and staff at their school. But the impact was particularly strong on students who received free or reduced-price lunch and on non-Hispanic Black students.   

On average, the researchers project that school shootings lead to a loss of $100,439 (in 2018 dollars) in the lifetime earnings of individual students.   

“The earning effects are much larger than what we would expect solely based on the changes in academic performance alone, which suggests that there is something broader happening in terms of how the affected students are able to function in a workplace,” Schnell says.  

Although Schnell and her colleagues were unable to directly measure mental health among Texas students, they showed in 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 longer-run outcomes.  

Our future workforce   

In an ideal world, the answer to gun violence is prevention, but “if we are living in a world where these events are going to keep happening, schools and communities have to find a way to help mitigate the harm for survivors,” Schnell says.  

One potential way to help students at schools where shootings occurred may be to provide them with more access to school-based health centers and resources. That could help normalize long-term mental-health care for survivors while cutting through common barriers for students such as affordability and scheduling.   

But a further analysis found that schools primarily responded by hiring more assistant principals (a 19.9 percent increase), who are typically responsible for school safety and discipline. The schools did not on average bring in more health professionals to support students, while the turnover rate among teachers and staff went up.    

“The response from schools in our sample was to increase discipline rather than expand mental-health support,” Schnell says.    

Ultimately, failing to address these issues can have adverse consequences not just on the lives of the students and communities involved but also on the economy through reductions in employment and earnings, according to the researchers.   

“More generally, this points to the role that all of us should play in prevention and mitigation [of gun violence],” Schnell says. “The costs of these tragedies are far-reaching and extend well beyond those who are physically injured. We can’t ignore how gun violence in our schools is affecting the next generation and our future workforce.”