{"id":275,"date":"2026-10-23T17:21:24","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T21:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/?p=275"},"modified":"2026-10-23T17:21:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T21:21:24","slug":"community-colleges-nurse-training-and-infant-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/2026\/10\/23\/community-colleges-nurse-training-and-infant-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Colleges, Nurse Training and Infant Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Date:<\/strong> Monday, December 4, 2026
\nTime:<\/strong> 12 \u2013 1:15 pm
\nLocation:<\/strong> Hybrid, Live Only.<\/p>\n

In-person: Yawkey Center for Student Services, 100 Bay State Road, Room 613B in Boston<\/p>\n

Registration<\/h2>\n

RSVP via Zoom for both in-person and virtual attendance. <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

RSVP kindly requested for in-person attendance. Required for Zoom.<\/p>\n

\u201cCommunity Colleges, Nurse Training and Infant Health\u201d with <\/span>Anna Aizer, Brown University & NBER. Dr. Aizer notes that work to be presented was created in collaboration with Adriana Lleras-Muney, UCLA & NBER.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n

Seminar Description<\/h3>\n

Though training of doctors in the US underwent a profound shift towards scientific rigor and professional qualifications in the early 20th<\/sup> 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. \u00a0We 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. \u00a0We 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Speaker Bio<\/h4>\n

Anna Aizer is the Maurice R. Greenberg<\/span> Professor of Economics at Brown University.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0She 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<\/span>\u00a0currently s<\/span>erves on the executive board of the Society of Labor Economists and is a member of the NICHD Advisory Council.\u00a0<\/span>Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of <\/span>income<\/span>. 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<\/span> juvenile<\/span> justice system in explaining why the children of poor mothers are more<\/span> <\/span>likely to <\/span>experience worse economic outcomes later in life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Date: Monday, December 4, 2026 Time: 12 \u2013 1:15 pm Location: Hybrid, Live Only. In-person: Yawkey Center for Student Services, 100 Bay State Road, Room 613B in Boston Registration RSVP via Zoom for both in-person and virtual attendance. RSVP kindly requested for in-person attendance. Required for Zoom. \u201cCommunity Colleges, Nurse Training and Infant Health\u201d with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25693,"featured_media":276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25693"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/popsciseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}