The Effect of Ruralness on Vocational Rehabilitation Applications

Most of the literature on evaluating vocational rehabilitation (VR) programs has taken application to the VR program as given despite the obvious selection issues associated with the decision to apply.

In this paper, we focus on the decision to apply for VR services and, in particular, on the effect of ruralness on that decision.

We use ordinary least squares with and without state-specific fixed effects along with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to estimate models of the application decision.

We find that people with disabilities from rural counties are less likely to apply for VR services than people with disabilities in more urban counties. We also find a wide distribution in state-specific fixed effect MLE estimates and show that only a small part of the variation across states is due to variation in Order-of-Selection rules.

We conclude that states should sponsor more research to better understand variation in VR application rates across states and across counties. We also suggest how such research could be used to raise low application rates.