Does making upper secondary school more comprehensive affect dropout rates, educational attainment and earnings? Evidence from a Swedish pilot scheme

No 2009:9, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: Since the mid-20th century many OECD countries have discarded their previous selective schools systems, in which students early on were separated between academic and vocational tracks, in favor of more comprehensive schools. The effects of these reforms have generally been difficult to evaluate and their consequences for students’ educational and labor market outcomes remain disputed. This paper evaluates the effects of the introduction of a more comprehensive upper secondary school system in Sweden in the 1990s. The reform reduced the differences between the academic and vocational educational tracks through prolonging and substantially increasing the academic content of all vocational tracks. The effects of this policy change are identified by exploiting a six year pilot scheme, which preceded the actual reform in some municipalities. The results show that the prolongation of the vocational tracks brought about an increased probability of dropping out among low performing students. Though one important motive behind the policy change was to enable all upper secondary school graduates to pursue a university degree, I find no effects on university enrolment or graduation. There are some indications, however, that attending the longer and more academic vocational track may have led to increased earnings in the long run.

Keywords: Upper secondary education; comprehensive school system; educational attainment; earnings; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2009-04-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Hall, Caroline, 'The Effects of Reducing Tracking in Upper Secondary School: Evidence from a Large-Scale Pilot Scheme' in Journal of Human Resources, 2012, pages 237-269.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2009/wp09-09.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2009/wp09-09.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifau.se/upload/pdf/se/2009/wp09-09.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2009_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).