Economics of Education Review最新文献

We examine the choices of undergraduate students at a French university who are competing for seats at foreign universities to fulfill a mandatory exchange program requirement. We find that average- and high-ability female students request universities that are worse-ranked than their male peers. A survey eliciting students’ preferences suggests that male students prioritize the academic characteristics of exchange universities, whereas similar female students consider both the academic and non-academic characteristics of exchange destinations. We explore the consequences of these differing preferences using a simulation that assigns students to exchange seats solely on university ranking and students’ academic performance.

Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional credentials and seek to make teaching a career. We test whether charter entry reduces the supply of university teacher education degrees, exploiting within- and between-district variation in the timing of charter school entry in districts containing college teacher preparation programs. Applying a generalized difference-in-difference model, we find that a 10 percent increase in charter market share decreases the supply of traditionally prepared teachers by one percent per year on average. This effect is concentrated in elementary education and special education degrees, which, anecdotally, are less valued in charter schools.

Award displacement occurs when one type of financial aid award directly contributes to the change in the quantity of another award. We explore whether postsecondary institutions displaced awards in response to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship by capitalizing on the doubling of the maximum Promise amount in 2012. We use de-identified student-level data on each Promise recipient's actual cost of attendance, grants, and scholarships, as well as demographic and academic characteristics from school district administrative files to examine whether and how components of students’ financial aid packages and total costs of attendance changed after the Promise award increase. To account for overall trends in pricing and financial aid, we compare Promise recipients to the average first-time, full-time freshman entering the same institutions in the same year as reported by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). With these two data sources, we assess differences in costs and awards between Promise students and their peers, on average, and examine whether and in what ways these differences changed after the increase in Promise funding. We refer to this strategy as a “quasi-difference-in-differences” design. We do not find evidence that institutions are responding to the Promise increase through aid reductions.

Despite the rapid increase in alternative schooling options across the United States in recent years, spillover effects of competition on public school students are not well understood. Standard arguments in support of school choice claim that competition creates incentives for incumbent schools to improve academic quality, but I argue that these schools may respond through increased provision of services valued by households that do not directly improve academic achievement. Using data from a charter school expansion in North Carolina, I find that charter competition had a negative effect on student achievement in public middle schools, and that this was importantly related to an increase in household influence and a decrease in teacher empowerment within incumbent schools.

Affirmative action is a promising solution to the crucial challenge of bridging the gap in women’s access to higher education in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I use public universities’ matriculation data from 2013–2018 and difference-in-differences estimators to examine the causal impact of a gender quota on women’s educational opportunities in Afghanistan. The quota increased the proportion of women in the treated concentration group by nine percentage points and the share of women from low socio-economic status by three percentage points. The expansion was associated with a 0.04-unit decline in the average score ratio of female-to-male applicants, driven by a reduction in the score threshold needed for women’s admission. The effects were condensed in competitive concentrations, where the overall share of women and women with low SES increased by 17 and four percentage points, respectively. The findings suggest that affirmative action is a viable option for addressing the gender gap in fragile settings.

Providing principals with low-stakes information on their students’ test scores has been shown to improve school management, instruction, and achievement in upper-middle income countries. We evaluate this approach by itself (“diagnostic feedback” or T1) and combined with tools and training (“performance management” or T2) through an experiment in 396 public primary schools in Salta, Argentina. After two years, T1 had null or adverse effects on students’ performance in school, but T2 reduced grade repetition (especially, among cohorts with more exposure), even a year after the interventions ended. We cannot rule out small-to-moderate effects on achievement. T2 also impacted teacher quality, student beliefs, bullying and discrimination, and extracurricular activities for high-exposure cohorts. Our results suggest that tools and training can effectively complement information in contexts of low principal capacity.

Exploiting admission thresholds for participating in Erasmus, the most popular higher education study abroad programme in Europe, we implement a regression discontinuity design and show that student mobility does not delay graduation and, in addition, has a positive and significant impact on the final graduation marks of undergraduate students. We find that Erasmus mobility improves graduation results for undergraduate students enrolled in scientific and technical fields and for those who apply in the first year of their studies, especially when enrolled in more demanding degree courses. Investigating plausible mechanisms, we find that the positive impact on performance at graduation is stronger for students who visit foreign universities of relatively lower quality compared to their home university. Finally, we do not find statistically significant effects of Erasmus mobility on postgraduate educational choices and labour market outcomes one year after graduation.

Despite billions of dollars spent yearly to fund higher education for low-income youth, no government agency tracks how many low-income young people attend college by state. Whereas proxy measures like Pell grant receipt address the number of already enrolled low-income students, direct estimates from U.S. Census surveys likely overestimate low-income youth enrollment due to their design. Using Bayesian multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP) to estimate postsecondary attendance rates by family income in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, we find substantial variation in attendance rates between income groups across the country.

The paper examines the effect of social identity on adult learning within a hierarchical social setting— an important yet often understudied issue for effective adult education. We leverage the random matching of students and teachers from a randomized controlled experiment in India, where illiterate adult female learners aged 18–45 were randomly assigned to a literacy program. We find a positive and significant impact of matching an upper caste teacher with a lower caste adult student on literacy scores. We also find suggestive evidence of an increase in students' confidence measures when matched with an upper caste teacher, indicating a plausible impact mechanism. Our findings highlight the need for future research on social identity and its influence on adult learning, particularly in countries with existing deep-rooted hierarchical social constructs.

This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation with an experimental design, that estimates the effect of a low-tech low-cost remote tutoring intervention applied during the pandemic for remedial education purposes on girls and boys aged 9-14 years in three departments of El Salvador. Our main contributions are a) the provision of strong experimental evidence that the intervention can improve student math learning in developing countries for closing education gaps; and b) the measurement of student anxiety levels before and after the treatment, which allows verifying whether student-tutor interactions mitigated some of the negative socioemotional effects of student confinement. The program is found to have had a positive and significant effect of 0.24 standard deviations on math learning, which is equivalent to a 33.8 percent acceleration as compared to the control group. However, no significant effects were observed on student anxiety levels, which suggests that the academic gains were not mediated by these types of socioemotional factors. The results provide valuable information for the design of tutor training and for the development of tutoring protocols, among other aspects, for future similar programs.