The impact of prolonging compulsory general education on the labour market

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the impact of the extension of the duration of general education on educational opportunities and labour market performance. Taking the example of the Polish education reform of 1999, which we treated as a natural experiment, we used a regression discontinuity design and estimated the effects of an additional year of general education on the relative opportunities for rural and urban children to obtain secondary general, secondary vocational, or tertiary education and on their wages. Although the impact was quantitatively small, a shift towards increased enrolment in general education programmes was observed. Whereas prolonged compulsory education translated to higher wages for basic and secondary vocational school graduates from rural areas, it did not do so, for those from urban areas.

KEYWORDS:

• School reform
• labour market
• educational economics
• secondary education
• vocational education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term “disadvantaged” will be used in this paper only in the context of the SES background. We define “disadvantaged students” as those from rural areas, where access to different types of schools is limited.

2. See e.g. Pekkarinen, Uusitalo, and Kerr (2009) for Finland, Pischke and von Wachter (2008) for Germany, and Aakviv et al. (2003) for Norway.

3. In 2017, another round of educational reforms in Poland returned the system to its previous form by replacing the lower-secondary school with the eight-year primary school arrangement.

4. The vocational path was chosen more often than the general one (Herbst and Wojciuk 2014).

5. There were other elements of the reforms that we do not present in this paper, such as the establishment of external examination boards and introduction of exams after each level of education.

6. During the transition, vocational schools continued to run educational programmes to support the centrally planned economy. The educational level was thus relatively low. The smaller number of graduates from these schools can be considered indicators of the success of the reform.

7. The cut-off was as follows: those born before 1 January 1986 followed the pre-reform system. Those born in 1986 and after were educated in the new system. Therefore, the 1986 cohort was the first to start studying in the gimnazjum in 1999.

8. We included individuals with educational attainments that were above secondary, but not tertiary.

9. After primary school, after the gimnazjum, and a standardised matura exam, being a final test after upper secondary school.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Center, Poland [2015/19/B/HS4/03231]. The authors are grateful to the participants of Macromodels 2017 and the Warsaw International Economic Meeting 2018, Allen Thurston, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Paweł Strawiński

Paweł Strawiński, PhD is an associate professor of Statistics and Econometrics at the Warsaw University. His research interests include data analysis, propensity score matching, and other microeconometric techniques, and his applied work is concentrated in the area of labour economic and education economics.

Paulina Broniatowska

Paulina Broniatowska, PhD Currently works out of academia. Her work focuses mostly on labour economics and on different aspects of population ageing and its macroeconomic consequences.