Age of Tracking and Educational Choices: New Evidences from Switzerland

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the impact of the age of tracking on educational outcomes. Evidences show that intergenerational correlation in educational attainment are stronger when the timing of school tracking takes place relatively early. We analyze the impact of the age of tracking with the help of a unique dataset, TREE, which is a longitudinal follow-up of individuals first surveyed in PISA 2000. Thus, we contribute to the literature by disentangling between ability effects and parental background effects. Our results show that early tracking indeed seems to to have an impact on the magnitude of intergenerational links. Yet, the results heavily depend on the level of measured ability as well as on the type of education considered