Teacher licensure status and student achievement: Lessons from private schools

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88) were used to investigate the effect of teacher licensure status on private school students’ 12th grade math and science test scores. This data includes schooling and family background information on students that can be linked to employment information on teachers. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, private school students of fully certified 12th grade math and science teachers do not appear to outperform students of private school teachers who are not fully certified.     

The externalities of crime: The effect of criminal involvement of parents on the educational attainment of their children

The empirical literature on education and crime suggests that both criminal behavior and educational attainment are transferred from parents to children. However, the impact of criminal behavior of parents on educational outcomes of children is generally ignored, even though the entailed social costs may be substantial. This study examines the effect of parents’ criminal involvement on the educational attainment of their children. To identify this effect, we combine a multinomial logit model with a Mahalanobis matching approach. The findings suggest that having criminally involved parents (1) increases the probability of finishing primary education as the highest education level attained (7–9 percentage points), and (2) decreases the probability of attaining higher education (2–6 percentage points). These results are robust to various specifications and are unlikely to be fully driven by differences in unobservables.     

Public investment and the goal of providing universal access to primary education by 2015 in Kenya

The authors use population census data to project school enrolment for Kenya. They also employ current education sector budget and national revenue base statistics to model the sector budget and to forecast the revenue base growth required to sustain universal primary education (UPE). The 2003 fiscal year unit cost of education is used as the base value for computing the budget needed to fund UPE through 2015, the year by which the international community aims to achieve UPE. The authors apply econometric analysis in exploring the policy implications for the education sector budget and capacity for revenue generation that would support the budgetary growth needed.     

Do in-state tuition benefits affect the enrollment of non-citizens? Evidence from universities in Texas

In 2001, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 1403. With the passage of the law, Texas became the first state to offer in-state tuition rates at public universities for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) who attended high school in the state for three years. As a result of the policy change, the cost of attending college at public universities in Texas fell dramatically for non-citizens. Using administrative data from five universities in Texas, we employ a quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of the policy change on the probability of enrollment at each of the universities. The results demonstrate a large and significant positive effect of lowering tuition on the enrollment of non-citizens at the University of Texas at Pan American and the University of Texas at San Antonio.     

Degree flexibility and university drop-out: The Italian experience

How to reduce university drop-out is a topic of increasing concern. Although several measures have been the subject of numerous debates, little attention has been given to those impacting on the duration, structure and content of the supply of university education. This paper looks at the Italian experience to see what can be learnt about the effectiveness of these measures. In 2001, the Italian university system embarked on a process of reform that introduced greater flexibility in the degree programme structure along with a wider range of services offered to students. Employing a decomposition analysis, we find that this reform is associated with changes in student behaviour leading to a decline in drop-out risk.     

Regulating private tutoring consumption in Korea: Lessons from another failure

The proliferation of private tutoring is a widespread phenomenon, Korea being one the most notable examples. Indeed, successive Korean governments have attempted to limit private tutoring consumption for more than four decades. In 2006, state education authorities imposed a restriction on operating hours of hagwon (private tutoring academies) in an attempt at reducing the economic and time resources spent on private tutoring. Since then, some provincial authorities have modified the curfew on hagwon. We take advantage of these policy shifts to identify average treatment effects taking a difference-in-differences approach. Our findings suggest that enforcing the curfew did not generate a significant reduction in the hours and resources spent on private tutoring, our results being heterogeneous by school level and socioeconomic status. Demand for private tutoring seems to be especially inelastic for high school students, who increased their consumption of alternative forms of private tutoring. As the consumption of private tutoring is positively correlated with academic performance and socioeconomic status, strengthening the curfew may have a negative effect on the equality of educational opportunities.     

Family background, school enrollments and wastage: evidence from Arab countries

Applying single and recursive bivariate probit models that utilize micro data sets of five countries, this paper examines the concatenation between school enrollments and family background. The empirical analysis captures considerable variations in the pattern of school enrollments and school wastage according to rural–urban locations and family background variables. Income gaps are powerful and interact with gender gap to produce differential school enrollment and wastage patterns. Access to credit partially redresses the adverse effects on school enrollments of negative household economic shocks. The findings call for more concerted government efforts to increase school enrollments and retention and to improve rural education particularly for females and the underprivileged.     

Differentiated demand for private supplementary tutoring: Patterns and implications in Hong Kong secondary education

A growing number of students around the world receive private tutoring in academic subjects. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education because it mimics regular schooling as the school sector grows, so does the shadow; and as the curriculum in the school changes, so does the curriculum in the shadow. Private tutoring has long been a significant phenomenon in East Asia, but has not received adequate research attention.This paper focuses on private tutoring in Hong Kong. It draws on data collected through questionnaires from students in Grades 9 and 12, and analyzes the factors which shape the demand for private tutoring. The paper highlights the influence of school, family and individual factors on students’ demand, and reports on students’ declared reasons for taking private tutoring. It commences with a broad comparative picture, and concludes by showing what the Hong Kong data add to wider conceptual understanding.     

Free education and social inequality in Ugandan primary schools: A step backward or a step in the right direction?

The intent of this study is to understand both direct and indirect resource effects in the context of a mass education system in Uganda. We find that under certain conditions, policies that promote physical resource availability can lead to substantial equity gains. A school's social composition appears to improve educational quality but it is also related to wider gaps between rich and poor students. We also show that heavier teaching workloads have the most damaging effect on low-income students who have fewer private resources to devote to academic pursuits. The policy implication is that equalising access to formal primary education does not guarantee equitable outcomes.     

The rational adolescent: Discipline policies, lawsuits, and skill acquisition

The paper estimates the response of student truancy and long-run labor market outcomes to discipline policies in middle and secondary school. Simultaneous determination of student behaviors and school policies motivates an instrumental variables strategy. Because judicial climate influences administrators’ fear of discipline-related lawsuits, measures of judicial–legal climate at the state-level court are used as instruments for local discipline policies. Results indicate that the state-level judicial–legal climate does appear to influence administrators’ discipline policies; that students appear to be truant less often when discipline is stricter; and that school and long-run labor participation outcomes appear higher for students from schools with stricter discipline policies.     

Free-education in Sri Lanka. Does it eliminate the family effect?

Using the human capital theory we modelled and estimated the school enrolment and the length of schooling decisions of Sri Lankans. Our results show a very clear positive association between family background and the education decision. Children of affluent families seem to derive more benefits from the free education policy. In particular, mother's education and parents' income have a strong effect on the education decision.     

Family learning environment and early literacy: A comparison of bilingual and monolingual children

Early research on literacy development usually focuses on children in preschool or kindergarten. Few studies have examined the early literacy of bilingual children. This study examines its relationship with different family learning environments (e.g. book availability), and family learning activities (e.g. reading books, telling stories, and singing songs) of bilingual and monolingual children from 9 months of age to kindergarten entry. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort was used as the analysis sample. We included 1300 bilingual children and 5150 English monolingual children. We uncover that bilingual children generally lag behind in both resources and frequency of family learning activities. Using various decomposition techniques, we show that early reading score differences between bilingual and monolingual children can be explained by differences in resources and early family learning environments.     

Family background, financial constraints and higher education attendance in China

Using data from the 2004 China College Student Survey, conducted by the author, this paper finds that long-term factors such as scholastic ability and parental education are significantly correlated with higher education attendance. By contrast, short-term financial constraints are also significantly associated with higher education access, but to a lesser degree. Furthermore, in recent years China's higher education expansion has provided broader access to students from lower income families. However, the tuition fees and “net prices” of elite universities are lower than those of medium quality universities, while the tuition fees and “net prices” of medium quality universities are lower than those of relatively low quality universities and colleges. This has led to a reverse relationship between family income and attendance costs, such that lower income families now shoulder a much higher burden for their childrens’ university education than higher income families.     

Is identification with school the key component in the ‘Black Box’ of education outcomes? Evidence from a randomized experiment

In this paper, we follow up the important class size reduction randomized experiment in Tennessee in the mid 1980s (Project STAR) to attempt to further understand the long-lasting influences of early education interventions. While STAR led to large test score benefits during the intervention, these benefits quickly faded at its conclusion. However, research has recently shown that the STAR experiment led to long term benefits, including increases in college entrance exams participation (ACT/SAT), especially for minority students. We collect new follow up data on high school participation in extracurricular activities to examine whether (1) STAR increased participation in high school activities and (2) whether this increase in participation in high school is the explanation behind the long term benefits of the intervention. We find suggestive evidence that STAR did indeed increase some aspects of high school participation, including scholastic honors and participation in sports, especially for minority students. In contrast, we find little evidence that this increase in participation is the mechanism that has conferred higher rates of college-going to the STAR students.     

Education and poverty in rural China

We analyze household and school survey data from poor counties in six Chinese provinces to examine the effects of poverty, intra-household decision-making, and school quality on educational investments (enrollment decisions) and learning outcomes (test scores and grade promotion). Unlike previous studies, we use direct measures of credit limits and women's empowerment. Drawing a distinction between the effects of wealth (measured by expenditures per capita) and credit constraints, we find that the former improves learning while the latter reduces educational investments. We find evidence of a story of gender bias in which academically weak girls are more likely to drop out in primary school while most boys continue on to junior secondary school. Women's empowerment reduces the likelihood of dropping out but does not affect other outcomes. Finally, our measures of school quality have some effect on the duration of primary school enrollment but not on learning.     

Aspiration levels and educational choices: An experimental study

The explanation of social inequalities in education is still a debated issue in economics. Recent empirical studies tend to downplay the potential role of credit constraint. This article tests a different potential explanation of social inequalities in education, specifically that social differences in aspiration level result in different educational choices. Having existed for a long time in the sociology of education, this explanation can be justified if aspiration levels are seen as reference points in a prospect theory framework. In order to test this explanation, this article applies the method of experimental economics to the issue of education choice and behaviour. One hundred and twenty-nine individuals participated in an experiment in which they had to perform a task over 15 stages grouped in three blocks or levels. In order to continue through the experiment, a minimum level of success was required at the end of each level. Rewards were dependent on the final level successfully reached. At the end of each level, participants could either choose to stop and take their reward or to pay a cost to continue further in order to possibly receive higher rewards. To test the impact of aspiration levels, outcomes were either presented as gains or losses relative to an initial sum. In accordance with the theoretical predictions, participants in the loss framing group choose to go further in the experiment. There was also a significant and interesting gender effect in the loss framing treatment, such that males performed better and reached higher levels.     

Economic growth in developing countries: The role of human capital

The focus on human capital as a driver of economic growth for developing countries has led to undue attention on school attainment. Developing countries have made considerable progress in closing the gap with developed countries in terms of school attainment, but recent research has underscored the importance of cognitive skills for economic growth. This result shifts attention to issues of school quality and, in that area developing countries have been much less successful in closing the gaps with developed countries. Without improving school quality, developing countries will find it difficult to improve their long run economic performance.     

Where the boys aren't: non-cognitive skills, returns to school and the gender gap in higher education

Nearly 60 percent of college students today are women. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative cohort of eighth grade students in 1988, I examine two potential explanations for the differential attendance rates of men and women—returns to schooling and non-cognitive skills. The attendance gap is roughly five percentage points for all high school graduates. Conditional on attendance, however, there are few differences in type of college, enrollment status or selectivity of institution. The majority of the attendance gap can be explained by differences in the characteristics of men and women, despite some gender differences in the determinants of college attendance. I find that higher non-cognitive skills and college premiums among women account for nearly 90 percent of the gender gap in higher education. Interestingly, non-cognitive factors continue to influence college enrollment after controlling for high school achievement.     

Endowment spending rates, intergenerational equity and the sources of capital gains

This paper analyzes how James Tobin’s widely cited concept of “intergenerational equity” for university endowments relates to the economic concepts of intertemporal substitutability and risk aversion. I show that Tobin’s concept of intergenerational equity is a very special case of intertemporal substitutability; a special case that implies very low tolerance for risk. Using the more general case, I show that the observed reduction in university spending rates during the 1990s can be viewed as a reasonable response to a period of non-recurring capital gains.     

College majors and the knowledge content of jobs

College students select majors for a variety of reasons, including expected returns in the labor market. This paper demonstrates an empirical method linking a census of US degrees and fields of study with measures of the knowledge content of jobs. The study combines individual wage and employment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) with ratings on 27 knowledge content areas from the Occupational Information Network (O^*NET), thus providing measures of the economy-wide knowledge content of jobs. Fields of study and corresponding BA degree data from the Digest of Education Statistics for 1976–1977 through 2001–2002 are linked to these 27 content areas. We find that the choice of college major is responsive to changes in the knowledge composition of jobs and, more problematically, the wage returns to types of knowledge. Women's degree responsiveness to knowledge content appears to be stronger than men's, but their response to wage returns is weak.