Pregnancy and Interrupted Schooling: Evidence from Monthly Histories

Pregnancy can disrupt schooling before infant care begins. We use monthly histories from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to study school interruptions during pregnancy and after childbirth and whether students later return to school or earn a diploma or GED. We jointly model conception and sustained interruptions in enrollment, allowing persistent unobserved differences to affect both processes. Under the timing-of-events identifying assumptions, pregnancy raises the monthly interruption rate to nearly four times the rate without pregnancy. Interruption rates are elevated before delivery and remain elevated afterward. After an interruption, students already exposed to pregnancy return to school and earn a diploma or GED less often within two years. These findings show that schooling disruption is already present during pregnancy, before the additional demands of infant care begin.