Community Colleges, Nurse Training and Infant Health
Date: Monday, December 4, 2026
Time: 12 – 1:15 pm
Location: Hybrid, Live Only.
In-person: Yawkey Center for Student Services, 100 Bay State Road, Room 613B in Boston
Registration
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RSVP kindly requested for in-person attendance. Required for Zoom.
Seminar Description
Though training of doctors in the US underwent a profound shift towards scientific rigor and professional qualifications in the early 20th century, opposition to training women in this way prevented a similar shift for nursing. This changed in 1960 when significant public policy initiatives dramatically reshaped nurse training in the United States by increasing federal funding for nurse training and moving nurse training out of hospital apprenticeship programs and into higher education, particularly community college, which emphasized stronger training in the biological and behavioral sciences. We construct a novel dataset that tracks the openings of new nursing schools by type from 1960 to 1980 to study how these large public investments in a more rigorous, scientifically backed training program affected population health. Three to five years after a nursing program opens in a community college, we observe significant declines in infant mortality which continue to increase in magnitude over time. We also observe changes in the health care infrastructure, as hospital bed expansions followed the shift in nurse training, suggesting that higher quality nursing complements other medical inputs.
Speaker Bio
Anna Aizer is the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being. She is co-director of the NBER’s program on Children and Families and currently serves on the executive board of the Society of Labor Economists and is a member of the NICHD Advisory Council. Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of income. In particular, she focuses on the roles played by health insurance and access to medical care, domestic violence, exposure to environmental toxins, the role of stress, discrimination in the labor market, job training and poor children’s greater interaction with the juvenile justice system in explaining why the children of poor mothers are more likely to experience worse economic outcomes later in life.