Attendance, schooling quality, and the demand for education of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and non-Hispanic whites

This study examines the influence of the opportunity costs of school attendance, educational quality attributes, and household socioeconomic status on the educational demand of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and non-Hispanic whites using the 1988–1990 surveys of the National Education Longitudinal Study. Implementing a utility-maximizing framework, educational demand assumes the form of schools' average daily attendance rates and student dropout decisions between the 8th and 10th grades. The basic results suggest that a school's attendance rate is sensitive to educational quality and student characteristics. Moreover, the demand for education measured by student attrition inversely relates to unexplained school attendance, and is positively affected by household socioeconomic status. Some policy recommendations based on the results are discussed.     

The effects of school quality on long-term health

In this paper I estimate the relationship between school quality and mortality. Although many studies have linked the quantity of education to health outcomes, the effect of school quality on health has yet to be examined. I construct synthetic birth cohorts and relate the quality of education they attained to their mortality rates. I find that there is a statistically significant relationship between the mortality–schooling gradients, which depict the return to a year of schooling, and the length of school term and relative teacher wage. For instance, increasing the relative teacher wage by one standard deviation results in about 1.9 less deaths per 1000 people per extra year of education. My results suggest that one way to improve the health of the population is to improve school quality.     

Does school time matter?—On the impact of compulsory education age on school dropout

A straightforward way to prevent students from leaving education without a higher secondary diploma is increasing the compulsory education age. The idea is that, by staying longer in school, more students eventually obtain a higher secondary diploma. This paper examines the impact of a one-year increase in compulsory school-age on dropping out of secondary education by a difference-in-differences analysis. For this, we exploit a recent compulsory education policy reform in the Netherlands. After controlling for confounding factors and observable covariates, we find that the one year increase in compulsory school-age reduces dropout by 2.5 percentage points. The effect, however, is entirely situated in the group non-liable to the policy reform. We observe that native Dutch vocational students, mostly without retention in grade, but also without a higher secondary diploma at hand, more often left school in the immediate period before the policy reform. Given the economic revival at that time, this may reflect anticipation of labor market opportunities.     

Finance, management, and costs of public and private schools in Indonesia

This paper investigates the impact of public vs private finance of education and public vs private management of schools on school cost and efficiency, using school-level data on revenues, expenditures, enrollments, examination scores and student characteristics from Indonesian primary schools. We find that in Indonesia, where schools generally operate at very low funding levels, more money is likely to bring better school quality. Private management is more efficient than public management in achieving academic quality. Private funding also improves efficiency whether the schools are publicly or privately managed, but the incremental effect declines as the local funding share increases.     

What determines the return to education: An extra year or a hurdle cleared?

The 1973 Raising of the School Leaving Age from 15 to 16 has been used to identify returns to years’ schooling. However, because the first set of “high stakes” exams are taken in the UK at age 16, the reform affected the proportion with qualifications, as well as schooling length. In order to shed light on whether the returns reflect the extra length of schooling or the increase in qualifications, we exploit another institutional rule – the Easter Leaving Rule – which we argue only affected the probability of obtaining qualifications (and not the length of schooling). We find sizeable returns to academic qualifications – increasing the probability of employment by 40% points – and our results suggest that qualifications drive most of the returns to education.     

Public spending on higher education in developing countries: Too much or too little?

This paper discusses problems with the prevalent view that public resources for education in developing countries should be reallocated from higher to lower levels of education. There may be a case for maintaining and even increasing spending on higher education, as long as public funds can be directed to research and other “public good” functions of institutions of higher education. Current measures of social returns to primary, secondary and higher education do not reflect unmeasured social benefits at each level; since we do not know the relative size of these benefits across levels, we do not know the true ranking of social returns across primary, secondary and higher education. The true social rate of return to certain components of higher education, such as research and postgraduate training in science and technology, and creation of other skills where social returns probably exceed private returns (such as public administration) is probably high, and in some settings, may now be as high or higher than the social rate of return to primary and secondary education. Moreover, achieving and sustaining adequate levels of quality to capture these social returns requires minimal stability in public financing, arguing against major reallocations away from higher education. But this does not argue for more public spending on all higher education programs. On the contrary; within the envelope of total public spending on higher education, reallocation away from public spending on undergraduate training makes sense, since such training probably has low social compared to private returns, and can be accomplished by greater reliance on private universities and by increasing tuition and other fees in public universities, while ensuring equitable access through loan and scholarship programs.     

Norms as a tool of analysis in the economics of education: A contribution of Massy and Zemsky

This paper suggests how Massy and Zemsky's concept of decision-making norms has promise as a tool to support the modeling of economic choices within educational organizations. This concept's practical value would be supported by: analysis of how informational economies are achieved through the delegation of certain relatively routine decisions reflected in norms to administrative personnel; developing criteria for inferring whether observed deviations from decision-making norms are permanent or transitory; and, most important, the development of informationally efficient mechanisms for making norms forward looking in terms of changes in the environment affecting the organization's productivity and financing.     

Municipal and private sector response to decentralization and school choice

A large number of developing nations are in the process of decentralizing basic education, with the aim of diversifying revenue sources and introducing greater accountability and efficiency. This is especially true in Latin America, where Chile introduced the first significant reform in 1981. This reform kept most of the responsibility for educational finance with the Ministry of Education but transferred the responsibility for delivering services to municipalities and non-profit, private schools. In response to this reform, municipalities increased their finance of public schools, and the supply of subsidized private education increased dramatically. By 1990, enrollment in subsidized private schools represented about one-third of total primary-secondary school enrollments. This paper examines the effects of the reform. Municipal finance, which is closely tied to municipal fiscal capacity, has created inequities in school expenditures even though it represents only 10% of total revenues. Variations in the private school market share across municipalities are principally explained by the ease of market entry, family socioeconomic status, and the relative performance of public and private schools; this model does not offer a satisfactory explanation of the growth in private school enrollments in Chile over time. The effect of the reform on cost-effectiveness is ambiguous. Ministry of Education non-teacher employment declined by over half, while cognitive tests also declined. There is some evidence that the growth in private school enrollments may have improved overall efficiency since private schools are found to be slightly more cost-effective than public schools.     

School quality and learning gains in rural Guatemala

I use unusually detailed data on schools, teachers and classrooms to explain student achievement growth in rural Guatemala. Several variables that have received little attention in previous studies – including the number of school days, teacher content knowledge and pedagogical methods – are robust predictors of achievement. A series of decompositions by student ethnicity and type of school shed some additional light on important questions in the Guatemalan context, and beyond. The large indigenous test score gap is not explained by differences in an extensive list of observable features of schools. The large effect for community characteristics suggests peer group effects or more general institutional differences related to services or labor markets. PRONADE community schools are associated with moderate gains vis-à-vis public schools in areas related to utilization of capacity, such as days worked. But these gains are largely offset by lower teacher capacity, which highlights the challenge of improving school quality in poor, rural areas.     

Private education in a poor country: The case of urban Bolivia

Investment in education is critical for economic growth and poverty alleviation. Such investment is typically being financed by the state. Yet in many countries families contribute privately to the education of their children. In an era of stagnating public budgets for education (and practically anything else), the private financing of education gains importance for a country's investment in human resources to be maintained. It is often claimed that private education is highly selective and afforded only by the rich. In this paper we examine the extent of private expenditure on education in a country that is among the poorest—Bolivia. In the empirical analysis we use data from both the 1990 and 1992 household surveys (Encuesta Intergrada de Hogares). The results show that there is a remarkable willingness of households in Bolivia to pay for private education for their children.     

Teacher salaries in Latin America: A review

In this paper we use data from household surveys of 12 Latin American countries to assess how teacher salaries compare to workers in other occupations. The results show great variability from one country to another, ranging from an apparent underpayment of teachers in Bolivia by 35% relative to the control group, and a respective overpayment of 65% in Colombia. However, when statistical controls are introduced for the differential education, hours worked and gender composition between teachers and the comparison group, much of the earnings differential between the two groups disappears. On the basis of this finding, we cannot support the position that teachers are either overpaid or underpaid.     

A utility model for teaching load decisions in academic departments

The authors model the class size and teaching load decisions of academic departments in terms of a departmental utility function. Utility is postulated to be asymmetric around class size and teaching load norms, and variables for curricular structure, disciplinary domain, and institutional type are taken into account. Maximization of the utility function produces decision rules for the number of sections to be offered for each course, and hence the faculty's overall teaching load. A nonlinear estimator is developed for the decision rules' parameters and applied to data from four liberal arts colleges and two research universities. Results are consistent with theories about faculty discretionary time and with expectations about the effects of curricular structure on class size. The paper concludes with a discussion about the effects of enrollment uncertainty on faculty load decisions.     

Economics of education: A research agenda

The paper presents a systematic taxonomy of research areas in the economics of education and gives a number of key topics that deserve more research attention in the future. Emphasis is put on documenting the unit cost of education at different schooling levels and curriculum types, along with the learning and earning outcomes of education. Evidence on the costs and benefits, from both the private and the social point of view, can lead to efficiency and equity assessments of an educational system. Among topics where the research effort should be intensified are the screening hypothesis, measuring education externalities and the quality of schooling.     

Differences by degree: Evidence of the net financial rates of return to undergraduate study for England and Wales

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the U.K. by subject studied. We use data from the recent U.K. Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first degree, and postgraduate qualifications. Ordinary Least Squares estimates show high average returns for women that does not differ by subject. For men, we find very large returns for Law, Economics and Management but not for other subjects. Degree class has large effects in all subjects suggesting the possibility of large returns to effort. Postgraduate study has large effects, independently of first degree class.A large rise in tuition fees across all subjects has only a modest impact on relative rates of return suggesting that little substitution across subjects would occur. The strong message that comes out of this research is that even a large rise in tuition fees makes little difference to the quality of the investment – those subjects that offer high returns (LEM for men, and all subjects for women) continue to do so. And those subjects that do not (especially OSSAH for men) will continue to offer poor returns. The effect of fee rises is dwarfed by existing cross subject differences in returns.     

Frequency of examinations and student achievement in a randomized experiment

We carry out a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at an Italian University attending two introductory economics classes to evaluate the impact on achievement of examination frequency and interim feedback provision. Students in the treated group were allowed to undertake an intermediate exam and were informed about the results obtained, while students in the control group could only take the final exam. The results show that students undertaking the intermediate exam perform better both in terms of the probability of passing the exams and of grades obtained. High ability students appear to benefit more from the treatment. The experiment design allows us to disentangle “workload division or commitment” effects from “feedback provision” effects. We find that the estimated treatment impact is due exclusively to the first effect, while the feedback provision has no positive effect on performance. Finally, the better performance of treated students in targeted examinations seems not to be obtained at the expenses of results earned in other examinations.     

Effects of Welfare Reform on Vocational Education and Training

Exploiting variation in welfare reform across states and over time and using relevant comparison groups, this study estimates the effects of welfare reform on an important source of human capital acquisition among women at risk for relying on welfare: vocational education and training. The results suggest that welfare reform reduced enrollment in full-time vocational education and had no significant effects on part-time vocational education or participation in other types of work-related courses, though there appears to be considerable heterogeneity across states with respect to the strictness of educational policy and the strength of work incentives under welfare reform. In addition, we find evidence of heterogeneous effects by prior educational attainment. We find no evidence that the previously observed negative effects of welfare reform on formal education (including college enrollment), which we replicated in this study, have been offset by increases in vocational education and training.     

Improving teacher preparation and selection: lessons from the Pennsylvania experience

This paper examines Pennsylvania's teacher preparation and selection processes over the last decade. Teacher test scores are examined across colleges of education, and extreme differences in teacher test scores are found. Also, extreme variations are evident among districts' employed teachers. A unique survey of district employment practices reveals that, on average, 40% of a district's teachers previously attended there as students. An exploratory econometric model indicates that the higher the unemployment rate in a district, the more likely it will hire its former students to teach, and that the greater the fraction of former students now in the district's teacher force, the lower is student achievement. The paper concludes with a discussion of conventional and unconventional strategies to improve the quality of teachers actually hired by school boards.     

The effect of immigrant concentration in schools on native and immigrant children's reading and math skills

Using a unique and very rich PISA dataset from Denmark, we show that the immigrant concentration in the school influences reading and math skills for both immigrant children and native children. Overall, children in schools with a high immigrant concentration score lower on reading and math test scores. The negative effects associated with attending a school with a high immigrant concentration are fairly robust across estimation methods. IV estimates, taking into consideration that parental sorting across neighborhoods might bias the OLS estimates, indicate that immigrant concentration in schools is still important in determining children's math test scores. The estimates are less precise regarding the effect of immigrant concentration on reading test scores. The immigrant concentration in the school has a stronger effect for native children than for immigrant children, but the differences are more pronounced for the math test.