How much does education matter and why?

This article explores the total (measured and unmeasured) effect of education on different socio-economic outcomes. The analysis shows that the usual regression models typically underestimate the effects of education. The effects of education are decomposed into three sources of variation: courses of study, schools and student composition. Schools do not seem to have a large impact. A significant part of the effect of education stems from differential selection of students into courses of study. However, there is a notable difference between social and economic rewards. Apart from level of education, selectivity and specificity of the course of study turn out to affect the labor market outcomeslabour market entry and occupational careers;

Early school-leaving in the Netherlands

The role of student-, family- and school factors for early school-leaving in lower secondary educationMost studies on early school-leaving address only partial causes of why some students leave school early. This study aims to develop a more elaborate model to explain early school-leaving in lower secondary education, taking into account individual, family and school factors at the same time. By using a longitudinal dataset we are able to attribute clear causal relations between the different factors. We distinguish four groups of school-leavers, separating ‘dropouts’ (those without any qualification) from those who left school after attaining a diploma in lower secondary education (‘low qualified’), those who pursued education as an apprentice (‘apprentices’) and the ones who continued education and received a full upper secondary qualification (‘full qualification). Discerning these four groups shows clear differences in the background of different types of early school-leavers and in the effects of school factors.labour market entry and occupational careers;

How Much Does Education Matter and Why? The Effects of Education on Socio-economic Outcomes among School-leavers in the Netherlands

This article explores the total (measured and unmeasured) impact of education on some of the main socio-economic outcomes (that is, employment opportunities, job security and wages) among school-leavers who finished upper secondary or tertiary education in the Netherlands. The empirical analysis shows that the effects of education are typically underestimated in labour market research. Education has a large impact on all outcomes under investigation. Apart from level of education, the selectivity of the study programme turns out to affect socio-economic outcomes, although the effects of the latter educational characteristic are only significant in the private sector. Differences between schools do not have an impact on wages and job security, but they do to some extent affect employment opportunities.

Social Bonding, Early School Leaving, and Delinquency

In this paper we investigate how successful social bonding theory is at predicting juvenile delinquency and school dropout behaviour. We adopt a simple dynamic approach which assumes that past involvement in risky behaviour reduces individual restraints for future participation in risky behaviour. We use a ten years education panel following Dutch adolescents who participated in a survey in their first year of high school in 1999. This information was matched to annual information on police arrests based on registry data. Our results show that school performance (as measured by test scores) is the key social bond element preventing young people from engaging in risk behaviour. We also find that involvement in past risky behaviour increases the likelihood of future missteps and that the protective influence of school performance is mitigated.labour economics ;

The effects of educational systems, school-composition, track-level, parental background and immigrants’ origins on the achievement of 15-years old native and immigrant students. A reanalysis of PISA 2006

The effects of educational systems, school-composition, track-level, parentalbackground and immigrants’ origins on the achievement of 15-years old native andimmigrant students. A reanalysis of PISA 2006.The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effectsof educational systems, school-composition and track-level on the educationalachievement of 15-years-old students. We specifically focus on the effects of socioeconomicand ethnic background on achievement scores and to what extent theseeffects are affected by characteristics of the school, track or educational system thesestudents are in. In doing so, we examine the ‘sorting’ mechanisms of schools and tracksin highly stratified, moderately stratified and comprehensive education systems. Weuse data from the 2006 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) wave.Compared to previous research in this area the main contribution of this paper is thatwe explicitly include track-level and school-level as separate units of analyses, whichleads to less biased results of the effects of characteristics of the educational system.The results highlight the importance of including track-level and school-level factorsin the debate of educational inequality of opportunity for students in differenteducation contexts. The findings clearly indicate that the effects of educationalsystem characteristics are flawed if the analysis uses only a country and a studentlevel and ignores the track- and school-level characteristics. Moreover the inclusionof the track-level is necessary to avoid overestimation of the school-compositioneffect, especially in stratified educational systems. From a policy perspective, the mostimportant finding is that educational system are not uniformly ‘good’ or ‘bad’, butthey have different consequences for different groups. Some groups are better offin comprehensive systems, while other groups are better off in moderately or highlystratified systems.labour market entry and occupational careers;