Introduction

Building on the Gateway Policy Explorer’s international compulsory schooling resources our education team recently released version 1.2 of the USA Compulsory Schooling Policy Details Document. This version of the policy report includes compulsory schooling and child labor policy documentation for all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. The document’s publication is the culmination of over two years of meticulous primary data collection and harmonization efforts by the Gateway’s education policy team (detailed in other blog posts here and here).

This blog post provides an overview of the US compulsory schooling document’s components, examples of its applications for researchers, and a look ahead at how we plan to grow in the future.

US Compulsory Schooling Document and Webpage Components

The US compulsory schooling document provides descriptions of compulsory schooling and child labor policy changes that date back to the middle of the 19th century – when these policies were first implemented in the United States – up until the present for all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. While the document’s primary focus is compulsory schooling legislation, child labor work permits are also included as they provide exemptions to full-time compulsory school attendance and are, therefore, essential for context.

In addition to policy descriptions, the document includes harmonized measures for key components of these laws (including a state’s compulsory school starting age and full-time work permit age), as well as calculations for the first group of students affected by each policy change (i.e., birth cohorts). The analysis begins with cohorts born in 1900, since this is approximately when these reforms first affected Health and Retirement Study (HRS) respondents.

After laying out the policy history and providing harmonized measures and cohort calculations, the document compares the Gateway’s policy data with data from other scholars who have published key work related to compulsory schooling in the U.S. At present, we compare our compulsory schooling policy data with the data reported by Lleras-Muney (2002) and Angrist and Krueger (1991). Many of the comparisons show strong alignment between datasets, which supports the validity of our measures. In cases where the data diverge, we investigate the differences to understand their underlying causes.

In addition to presenting the information in the document, the Gateway’s US compulsory schooling webpage provides additional resources for researchers. Each state’s profile contains archived versions of the original compulsory schooling and child labor legislation. The webpage also includes a policy comparison tool, which allows users to compare specific components of compulsory schooling policies, such as the minimum school leaving age, across states and over time. An example of these comparisons for California and Virginia is shown below.

Applications of Compulsory Schooling Data for Researchers

Compulsory schooling policy data has attracted increasing interest to researchers over the past several decades. Compulsory schooling policies – particularly in the US – exhibit significant temporal and geographic variation, and lead to differences in overall educational attainment. Researchers have analyzed these differences in educational attainment and have linked them to a multitude of health outcomes: cognition, fertility, mortality, mental health, obesity, heart disease, and cancer are just a few (see Hamad et al., 2018 for a more comprehensive overview).

The Gateway’s US compulsory schooling document and data enable analyses similar to those described above. Researchers can download data for their states and time periods of interest from the Gateway website (see below), and merge this data with data from other sources, such as Census data from IPUMS. See the Gateway’s June 2025 webinar on compulsory schooling data for resources and an in-depth tutorial on how to use this data.

Next Step: Version 2.0

Now that the Gateway Policy Explorer published version 1.2 of the USA Compulsory Schooling Policy Details Document, the education team is working to develop and release version 2.0 by the end of the year. Version 2.0 will include a new introduction and will harmonize the text across state profiles, providing a more cohesive, easy-to-follow policy narrative for researchers.