{"title":"Buying time: Financial aid allows college students to work less while enrolled","authors":"Drew M. Anderson, Melanie A. Zaber","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102686","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102686","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many empirical studies have found that financial aid improves college attainment. Few have been able to test why. This study used administrative records of employment and earnings to get a more complete picture of students’ finances during college and test one potential mechanism: financial aid buys students time by allowing them to work less in off-campus jobs. We studied recipients of New Jersey’s need-based Tuition Aid Grant (TAG). We used the eligibility cutoffs of TAG to identify groups of otherwise similar students who received sharply different amounts of aid. A prior study took the same approach and found that TAG increased on-time graduation rates from public universities. At these schools, 80 percent of TAG recipients worked at some point during the year. This study found that when students received additional aid, on average they reduced earnings dollar for dollar.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102686"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144757235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maurizio Strazzeri , Enzo Brox , Chantal Oggenfuss , Stefan C. Wolter
{"title":"Early exposure to foreign language training and students’ educational trajectories","authors":"Maurizio Strazzeri , Enzo Brox , Chantal Oggenfuss , Stefan C. Wolter","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102684","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102684","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We estimate the impact of a large curriculum reform in Switzerland that substantially increased the share of foreign language classes in compulsory school on students’ subsequent educational choices in upper secondary school. Our analysis focuses on students from German-speaking cantons that introduced English as the first foreign language. Using detailed student register data and exploiting the staggered implementation of the curriculum reform, we find that exposure to more foreign language classes has only minor effects on educational trajectories of the overall student population. However, we find substantial effect heterogeneity: while the reform has no effect on the direct educational progression of low-track female or high-track students, it impedes low-track male students’ transition to upper secondary education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102684"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rosa Sanchis-Guarner , José Montalbán , Felix Weinhardt
{"title":"Home broadband and human capital formation","authors":"Rosa Sanchis-Guarner , José Montalbán , Felix Weinhardt","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102679","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102679","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using administrative data from England, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our primary estimation leverages jumps in connection quality between close neighbors across thousands of invisible telephone exchange station catchment area boundaries. We find that home broadband speed has positive effects on general measures of human capital, with these effects concentrated among high-ability students and those not eligible for free school meals. These positive outcomes result from more education-oriented internet use. However, these effects are observed only for students who attend schools with faster broadband connections. Our study documents a complementarity between home and school technology in relation to general measures of human capital. Policies introducing new learning technologies should take this complementarity into account.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102679"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144663387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labour market effects of work-related continuous education in Switzerland – evidence from administrative data","authors":"Stefan Denzler , Jens Ruhose , Stefan C. Wolter","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102683","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102683","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents the first longitudinal estimates of the effect of work-related training on labour market outcomes in Switzerland. Using a novel dataset that links official census data on adult education to longitudinal register data on labour market outcomes, we apply a regression-adjusted matched difference-in-differences approach with entropy balancing to account for selection bias and sorting. We find that training participation increases yearly earnings and reduces the risk of unemployment two and three years after the treatment. The effects are heterogeneous as to age, education, and income position, whereby people in the lowest income tercile benefit most from income increases, while the dampening effect on unemployment is more pronounced for those in the highest income tercile.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102683"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rank, peer achievement, and shadow education: Evidence from secondary school students in China","authors":"Chaonuo Dai , Yuzhi Zhou","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102682","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102682","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies the effects of academic rank and peer achievement on shadow education, such as private tutoring, among secondary students in China. Exploiting the random assignment of students to classrooms, we find that ranking higher relative to peers and better average peer achievement reduce shadow education participation, time use, and monetary expenditure. The effects of rank are more pronounced than peer achievement. Such rank and peer effects are mitigated when parents have imperfect information about a child’s performance, suggesting that educational policies reducing the visibility of precise rank information to parents may reduce the demand for shadow education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102682"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144663386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Umut Dur , Robert G. Hammond , Matthew A. Lenard , Melinda Morrill , Thayer Morrill , Colleen Paeplow
{"title":"The attraction of magnet schools: Evidence from embedded lotteries in school assignment","authors":"Umut Dur , Robert G. Hammond , Matthew A. Lenard , Melinda Morrill , Thayer Morrill , Colleen Paeplow","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102663","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102663","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Magnet schools provide innovative curricula designed to attract students from other schools within a school district, typically with the joint goals of diversifying enrollment and boosting achievement. Measuring the impact of attending a magnet school is challenging because students choose to apply and schools have priorities over types of students. Moreover, magnet schools may influence non-cognitive skill formation that is not well-reflected in test scores. This study estimates the causal impact of attending a magnet school on student outcomes by leveraging exogenous variation arising from tie breakers embedded in a centralized school assignment mechanism. Using a rich set of administrative data from a large school district, we find robust evidence that attending a magnet school significantly increases student engagement, as measured through absenteeism and on-time progress rates. Students are significantly less likely to change schools when attending a magnet. We find suggestive evidence that attending a magnet school led to higher performance in mathematics and that attending non-language immersion magnet schools increased students’ reading scores. Together, these results suggest that magnet schools — a typically understudied school choice option — can benefit student learning and increase student engagement while enabling the system to achieve its goals of promoting racial and socioeconomic balance through school choice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102663"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144572360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why do parents underinvest in their children’s education? Evidence from China","authors":"Jiyuan Wang , Rob Alessie , Viola Angelini","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102676","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102676","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper we study whether the presence of financial constraints that limit parents’ ability to borrow and the existence of educational fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children’s human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut and Tran (2005) and then we test their empirical relevance using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). Our results support the idea that especially fixed costs play an important role in explaining human capital underinvestment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102676"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144572361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact of breaking the language barrier on school education — Evidence from West Bengal in India","authors":"Sandip K. Agarwal , Souvik Dutta , Maharnab Naha","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102678","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102678","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the impact of reducing language barriers on educational outcomes in the state of West Bengal, India. Specifically, we analyze the effects of a policy reform that introduced question papers in Hindi for all subjects in grades 11 and 12 higher secondary examinations, aimed at supporting students in schools with Hindi as the language of instruction. Using school-level administrative data, we employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify the causal effects of the intervention on grade repetition and grade enrollment. Our findings reveal that the policy led to a decline in the share of repeaters and an increase in enrollment. This finding bears significant policy implications, particularly in educational settings where there is a mismatch between the language of instruction and the language used for assessment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102678"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144548651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Labor Market Returns to Very Short-Term Rapid Postsecondary Certificates","authors":"Rajeev Darolia , Chuanyi Guo , Youngran Kim","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102681","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102681","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Currently, colleges and universities award over a million undergraduate certificates annually, accounting for about a quarter of undergraduate postsecondary credentials awarded each year in the United States. The fastest growing certificates are those that take less than a year to complete, with such awards growing about 60% over the past two decades and outpacing growth in any other type of undergraduate credentials. The precipitous growth in certificate awards, driven by prominent policy initiatives and student demand, has led to questions about the value of short-term postsecondary credentials. We examine the labor market returns to short and very short certificates, including those that require only a few credits to complete, using data from Kentucky that has among the highest awarding rates of such credentials. Though less expensive in terms of both direct and indirect costs, we find that rapid certificates (those that require 6 credits or fewer) have similar labor market returns to longer but still short-term certificates (7-15 or 16-36 credits) in the first few years after the certificate is earned. Rapid certificates yield the greatest immediate earnings and employment gains, though these benefits begin to fade out within a few quarters.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102681"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144534973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sabrina Auci , Manuela Coromaldi , Gianni De Fraja
{"title":"School autonomy and pupils’ performance: Academy conversion in English primary schools","authors":"Sabrina Auci , Manuela Coromaldi , Gianni De Fraja","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102674","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102674","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the effect on primary school pupils’ education attainment of their school’s conversion to “academy” status, a change in the schools’ governance regime which increased their managerial autonomy. We use a panel switching regression model where the conversion decision is instrumented with the attitude towards conversion of the stakeholders in the school’s administrative authority to account for the potential endogeneity of the conversion to academy status. We look beyond the average effect, and focus on the potential difference in effect for different children and different schools and as time passes. We find that conversion had at most limited effects on the pupils’ attainment in the short term. Any improved attainment fades away as time passes, and is weaker or absent for more able children, and for those in schools with fewer advantaged pupils.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102674"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144490453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}