Is Liberal Arts Education a Dominated Alternative? Assessing STEM and Liberal Arts Coursework in Italy’s Secondary Education

Abstract

Few studies address the effect of coursework on student achievement. Resultingly, Liberal Arts and STEM education are rarely stacked up against each other despite the increasing evidence that technical classes increase lifetime earnings. The practice of academic tracking in Italy's secondary education allows to compare differences in achievement between the two élite tracks offering distinctive courseload in humanities and technical subjects. Using PISA data from the 2012, 2015, and 2018 waves of the test, the study shows that attending the Liberal Arts track substantially decreases achievement on the math and science sections of the test while not granting any reading premium. Propensity score matching and regression decomposition suggest that the effect depends on the production function rather than on lacking educational inputs. Thus, they warrant the conclusion that the technical track generates human capital more efficiently than the Liberal Arts track does. Potential self-selection issues are acknowledged and back the belief that the effect sizes calculated in the study represent lower bounds for the underlying negative impact of Liberal Arts education.