The hidden cost of disaster: Education losses could last for decades

Hidden cost of disaster: Education losses could last for years

The rebuild in Maui is expected to cost more than $5.5 billion
Research shows natural disasters also impact students' test scores later on
It's still unclear what drives post-disaster learning loss

Updated: Aug 22, 2023 / 05:29 PM CDT

Wildfire wreckage is shown Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people ran for their lives from wildfires on Maui that wiped out a historic town. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

(NewsNation) — With more than 2,200 structures damaged or destroyed, the rebuild in Maui is expected to cost more than $5.5 billion, but physical damage is just one part of the economic cost.

New research shows natural disasters also damage human capital, the knowledge and skills that drive economic mobility.

In the year after a disaster, student test scores go down, and so do rates of college attendance, according to the study.

“We found that the loss in the value of human capital is on par with the cost of damages to buildings and other infrastructure,” Isaac M. Opper, an economist at the RAND Corporation who led the research, wrote in a recent op-ed.

Opper and his co-authors found large disasters reduced postsecondary enrollment by 2.5%. For younger students, the drop in test scores was equivalent to a 10% cut in the annual reading gain for middle schoolers.

Those declines can slow progress for individuals — and regions — years after a tragedy.

NewsNation spoke with Opper about his findings and their implications.

Some responses have been shortened and edited for clarity.

NewsNation: When it comes to rebuilding after natural disasters, your research suggests we need to be thinking about more than just structures. Can you explain why focusing on physical damage doesn’t capture the full economic cost?

Opper: We looked at what happened to educational outcomes in the year after a disaster, relative to the year before a disaster, and we showed that disasters, in general, have an impact on student test scores.

There’s some evidence that [a natural disaster] affects students’ likelihood of graduating from high school a year down the road, and it does reduce college attendance.

We find that the overall cost, and damage to human capital, is about the same order of magnitude as the property damage cost. So if there’s $500 of property damage per person, then there’s about $500 for the human capital side as well.

NewsNation: Do we know if it’s people in the community who experience that learning loss or is it more about migration — an artifact of people leaving the area after a disaster?

Opper: We can’t answer that definitively, but we feel pretty confident that it’s not a story of migration.

We can look roughly at whether the effect is similar across different subgroups of individuals. Even if you drill it down based on race and gender, or whether you’re an English language learner, or if you’re classified as getting free and reduced lunch … we see generally similar effects across each of these different subgroups.

If it was a migration issue, you’d see different changes in the types of people who are there, and we don’t really see that. Even in disasters where we don’t see much out-migration, we still see the effects on test scores.

NewsNation: Your study primarily focuses on the year after a disaster; do educational outcomes recover later on?

Opper: We see no evidence that it reverts to what it was. So it looks like there’s an immediate drop, and then it just kind of stays there — it doesn’t continue to get worse, but it also doesn’t continue to get better. It basically drops to a lower level and stays there — both in terms of test scores as well as college attendance.

NewsNation: Do we know what’s causing this?

Opper: I don’t think we know yet exactly why. Is it because you’re just reducing the number of school days, or is it because of the psychological stress of suffering through this? Or is it a financial issue where something happens to your house and so you take a second job to try to come up with the money to fix that?

I don’t think we know exactly what is causing it, but I do think we know that it is the effect on individuals rather than purely driven by migration.

NewsNation: What can we do about it?

Opper: This is the most frustrating answer, but I don’t really know.

At some level, we know how to rebuild a hospital that gets destroyed, but I don’t think we have a great sense of knowing how to rebuild the human capital — as evidenced by the COVID pandemic, which is a very different type of natural disaster.

I think we’re still trying to figure out how to make up for the loss [COVID-19] caused. I hope this is the start of research that helps us answer that question better.