Based on analyses of the effects of a wide range of educational experiences in different countries and time periods, the recent education literature suggests that high school interventions can affect a wide range of outcomes, including earnings, family life, health and happiness. In this paper we use a uniquely valuable dataset to document how a single educational intervention in a particular UK setting can affect all of these outcomes. The intervention is assignment to the elite high school in the selective secondary education system that existed in the UK until the late 1960s. The setting is a Scottish school district in which secondary school assignments were a rigid function of the scores obtained on a series of tests taken at age eleven (the
’11-plus’). The dataset, the ‘Aberdeen Children of the 1950s’
contains a large sample of children that were born in the 1950s and attended secondary schools in this district in the 1960s.
In 2001, aged around fifty, these children were traced and
administered a wide-ranging questionnaire. We exploit the
sharpness of the 11-plus rules to implement instrumental
variables and regression discontinuity estimates of the causal
effects of attending an elite school on a selection of these
long-term outcomes. We then try to shed light on the mechanisms underpinning these effects before comparing these effects to the effects associated with other dimensions of children’s background such as parental social class.
Presented by:
Emilia Del Bono (ISER)
Date & time:
December 17, 2008 1:00 pm - December 17, 2008 2:00 pm
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