The Consumption Value of Higher Education

The consumption value of higher education is an important factor behind the individual’s educational choice. We provide a comprehensive literature survey, and define the consumption value as the private, intended, non-pecuniary return to higher education. We provide new empirical evidence for the willingness to pay for the consumption value of a particular type of higher education. Even when controlling for ability selection, we find on US data that Liberal Arts graduates were willing to forego 46 pct. of their potential income in order to enjoy the consumption value of this educational type.educational choice, type of education, non-pecuniary return, willingness to pay, consumption value of education

Playing the system: address manipulation and access to schools

Strategic incentives may lead to inefficient and unequal provision of public services. A prominent example is school admissions. Existing research shows that applicants "play the system" by submitting school rankings strategically. We investigate whether applicants also play the system by manipulating their eligibility at schools. We analyze this applicant deception in a theoretical model and provide testable predictions for commonly-used admission procedures. We confirm these model predictions empirically by analyzing the implementation of two reforms. First, we find that the introduction of a residence-based school-admission criterion in Denmark caused address changes to increase by more than 100% before the high-school application deadline. This increase occurred only in areas where the incentive to manipulate is high-powered. Second, to assess whether this behavior reflects actual address changes, we study a second reform that required applicants to provide additional proof of place of residence to approve an address change. The second reform significantly reduced address changes around the school application deadline, suggesting that the observed increase in address changes mainly reflects manipulation. The manipulation is driven by applicants from more affluent households and their behavior affects non-manipulating applicants. Counter-factual simulations show that among students not enrolling in their first listed school, more than 25% would have been offered a place in the absence of address manipulation and their peer GPA is 0.2SD lower due to the manipulative behavior of other applicants. Our findings show that popular school choice systems give applicants the incentive to play the system with real implications for non-strategic applicants

Assessments in Education

Assessments like standardized tests and teacher evaluations are central elements of educational systems. Assessments affect the behaviour of students, teachers, parents, schools, and policymakers through at least two channels: The information channel and the incentive channel. Students use the information to adjust study effort and to guide their course selection. Schools and teachers use information from assessments to evaluate teaching quality and the effectiveness of the applied methods. Educational programs use information from assessment results to sort students in educational programs and employers use the results as signals of productivity in their hiring decisions. Finally, policymakers use assessments in accountability systems to reward or penalize schools, and parents use information from assessment results to select schools. The incentive channel is a natural consequence of the information channel: Students are incentivized to work hard and do well in assessments to get access to educational programs and jobs. Teachers and schools are incentivized to do well to receive rewards or avoid punishments in accountability systems. The information channel is important for ensuring the most efficient human capital investments: students learn about the returns and costs of effort investments and about their abilities and comparative advantages. Teachers and schools learn about the most effective teaching methods. However, because of the strong incentives linked to assessments, both students and teachers might focus on optimizing assessment results at the cost of learning. Students might for example select tracks that maximize their grades instead of selecting tracks aligned with their interests and comparative advantages. Understanding the implications of assessments for the behaviour of students, parents, teachers, and schools is therefore necessary to achieve the overall goals of the educational system. Because education affects lifetime earnings, health, and well-being and assessments play an important role in individuals’ educational careers, assessments are also important for efficiency and equity across domains. Biases in assessments and the heterogeneity in access to assessments are sources of inequality in education according to gender, origin, and socioeconomic background. Finally, because assessment results also carry important consequences for individuals’ educational opportunities and in the labor market, they are a source of stress and reduced well-being