School Choice and Educational Mobility: Lessons from Secondary School Applications in Ghana

Abstract

Do school choice programs increase opportunities for educational mobility or reinforce initial disparities in schooling? I address this question in the context of the public education system in Ghana, which uses standardized tests and a nation-wide application process to allocate 150,000 elementary school students to 650 secondary schools. As has been found in other settings, students from lower-performing elementary schools in Ghana apply to less selective secondary schools than students with the same test scores from higher-performing elementary schools. My analysis suggests that dierences in application behavior are largely due to imperfect information about admission chances and dierences in decision-making skills, rather than dierences in preferences or the costs and accessibility of schools. Additionally, I show that the impact of uncertainty declines following a series of reforms in the application process that expanded the number of choices students could list, and encouraged students to select a more \diversied"