http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9082-4665
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ABSTRACT
Most studies on the effects of tracks during secondary education focus on specific short-term academic performance indicators. This study compared the effects of tracks on long-term unemployment from 1995 to 2015, using a Flemish longitudinal cohort study (4,333 students in 54 schools). Tracks in Flanders have a hierarchy in mean academic ability. Therefore, we compared pairs of hierarchically consecutive tracks by propensity score matching students across these tracks. Because many students changed track over time, we distinguished between students who followed a track completely and those who changed to a lower track. Discrete-time event history analysis was used to describe the probabilities of becoming unemployed when active (employed or in education) and the probabilities of becoming active when unemployed. The results showed that students who followed a higher track completely had lower probabilities of becoming unemployed.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the schools, students, and their parents for the effort put into cooperating, as well as the LOSO team of the Centre for Educational Effectiveness and Evaluation for collecting the data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Jonas Dockx
Jonas Dockx is a PhD student at the Centre for Educational Effectiveness and Evaluation at the KU Leuven. His main research interests include the effects of tracks during secondary education on student outcomes.
Bieke De Fraine
Bieke De Fraine is an associate professor and head of the Centre for Educational Effectiveness and Evaluation at the KU Leuven. Her main research interests include educational effectiveness studies and growth curve modeling.