Contraception increases high school graduation – questionable numbers

In Stevenson et al 2021 “The impact of contraceptive access on high school graduation” in Science Advances, some numbers do not add up. In the Supplementary Material, Table S1 lists the pre-intervention Other, non-Hispanic cohort size in the 2010 US Census and 2009 through 2017 1-year American Community Survey data as 300, but Table S2 as 290 = 100+70+30+90 (Black + Asian + American Indian + Other/Multiple Races). The post-intervention cohort size is 200 in Table S1, but 230 in Table S2, so the difference is in the other direction (S2 larger) and cannot be due to the same adjustment of one Table for both cohorts, e.g. omitting some racial group or double-counting multiracial people. The main conclusions still hold with the adjusted numbers.

It is interesting that the graduation rate for the Other race group is omitted from the main paper and the Supplementary Material Table S3, because by my calculations, in Colorado, the Other graduation rate decreased after the CFPI contraception access expansion, but in the Parallel Trends states (the main comparison group of US states that the authors use), the Other graduation rate increased significantly. The one missing row in the Table is exactly the one in which the results are the opposite to the rest of the paper and the conclusions of the authors.

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