What determines post-compulsory academic studies? Evidence from the longitudinal survey of young people in England

ABSTRACT

We show that educational attainments at the end of the compulsory schooling stage are powerful predictors for post-compulsory educational choices in England. In particular, the single academic success indicator of achieving the Government’s gold standard in GCSE is able to predict virtually all the observed incidences of post-compulsory studies for academic qualifications. Notwithstanding, Two-Stage Least Squares estimation which exploits variations in school starting age induced by school entry rules suggests that the least-squares effect of achieving the gold standard in GCSEs on studying for academic qualifications is due to ability bias or reverse causation.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational choice
• Two-Stage Least Squares
• gold standard in GCSEs
• relative school starting age

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J24
• P36

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Antonio Di Paolo, Colm Harmon, Jagjit Chadha and participants at the WPEG conference, the First Lisbon Research Workshop on Economics and Econometrics of Education and the XIX Meeting of the Economics of Education Association for their helpful comments. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education. Students achieve the ‘gold standard’ in GCSE if they achieve five or more A* to C passes, including English and Mathematics.

² Young persons born before 1 September 1989 or after 31 August 1990 are excluded from the sample on the basis that they violate the school entry rule for the Wave 1 cohort.

³ Academic qualifications include A Levels and its component units, Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education (AVCEs), or GCSEs. There are only 51 young people taking AVCEs, which are full-time education based at schools or colleges, unlike traditional vocational routes such as apprenticeships. Of the 351 young people studying for GCSEs post-compulsory schooling, only 8% have achieved the gold standard, suggesting many of them are retaking subject (or retaking examinations) to improve their grades.

⁴ We omit the type of school indicator and parental aspirations from Wave 1, for fear of endogeneity problems. The mother’s employment status and family income variables are excluded for similar reasons.

⁵ Crawford, Dearden, and Meghir (2007) estimate that around one half of all children born between 1997 and 1999 started school in a Local Education Authority where a single-entry-point system was in operation.

⁶ Admittedly, children exposed to multi-entry-points systems will receive different length of education (up to 2 terms) at the end of the compulsory education stage. This idea has been exploited by Del Bono and Galindo-Rueda (2004) for the UK and Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2011) for Norway.

⁷ To check the validity of our findings under the presence of heteroscedasticity, we re-estimated the results in Table 2 with a robust VCE. The robust standard errors and associated diagnostic tests are qualitatively identical.