{"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":"2025-10-01","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}
{"title":"The quality of online instruction and returns to instructor experience","authors":"Xi Zhang , Ann Atwater","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102700","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102700","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine student satisfaction and performance in online versus in-person sections at a large research university in the United States, exploring whether observed gaps are inherent to online instruction or can be mitigated with increased teaching experience. Using administrative data from over 40,000 course sections taught over eight years, we find that students evaluate online courses as worse than in-person courses, despite minimal differences in performance. This gap persists even when restricting the sample to courses taught using both modalities by the same professor in the same semester, and after matching on observable student characteristics. Lower evaluations are primarily driven by student perceptions of instructor availability, concern for students, and the ability to stimulate interest in the course. Although teaching experience improves evaluations in online sections, the gap between modes remains, suggesting fundamental challenges in online instruction beyond technological familiarity.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102700"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144867267","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 labour market returns to graduation: reconciling administrative and survey data estimates","authors":"Anna Adamecz , Matt Dickson , Nikki Shure","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102701","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102701","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper contributes to the literature on the earnings returns to university graduation. Recent evidence using administrative earnings data from England suggests a zero return to graduation for men and positive returns to graduation for women in annual earnings at age 26. We show that once hours worked are taken into account – typically not available in administrative tax data – returns to graduation in hourly wages are considerably smaller for women than returns in annual wages at this age. Graduate women work more hours than comparable non-graduate women; thus, not taking hours worked into account leads to overestimating returns to graduation for women by more than two-fold. This highlights the importance of using both survey and administrative data sources when estimating the returns to university graduation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"108 ","pages":"Article 102701"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144828413","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":"2025-10-01","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}
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":"2025-08-01","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":"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":"2025-08-01","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":"Learning disruptions and academic outcomes","authors":"Rakesh Banerjee , Tushar Bharati","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102650","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102650","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine the impact of school closures and the transition to online learning on the average learning outcomes of Australian children. Using longitudinal data on annual school-level performance in standardized assessments across five subjects and four grade levels, we analyse trends over 14 years (2008–2022, excluding 2020) for all Australian schools. Our analysis compares regions with varying levels of disruption to face-to-face teaching. Our findings indicate that COVID-related school closures led to a <span><math><mrow><mn>0</mn><mo>.</mo><mn>17</mn><mi>σ</mi></mrow></math></span> decline in standardized test scores (all-subject average). This decline occurs both in primary and secondary grades, affecting language and numeracy skills. The negative effects persist for at least three years after schools resumed in-person teaching. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that students from relatively advantaged background, who potentially made better use of the school inputs, suffered more. Additionally, we find (i) school closures reduced learning disparities among secondary school students attending the same school as well as across secondary schools in a region, (ii) schools with higher teacher–student ratios were better able to mitigate the negative effects of closures, and (iii) government income support helped alleviate the adverse impact of school closures on student learning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102650"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144185358","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 impact of work-based versus school-based learning on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in vocational secondary education","authors":"Ilse Tobback , Dieter Verhaest , Kristof De Witte","doi":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102673","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102673","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate how work-based versus school-based learning impacts students’ cognitive (numeracy, literacy) and non-cognitive outcomes (student motivation, engagement, academic self-concept, well-being) in vocational secondary education. To this end, we exploit longitudinal test score and survey data on a cohort of Belgian pupils. We rely on school-field-of-study fixed effects, (non-)cognitive test scores in the preceding grades, and detailed background characteristics to remove the bias resulting from self-selection into educational programmes. Within the technical track aimed at preparing students both for the labour market and further education, we find the effects of substituting school-based for work-based learning on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes to be negative. Within the purely vocational track, by contrast, effects seem to be more mixed and to depend on the outcome and amount of workplace learning. These results are consistent with cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes being crucial mechanisms underlying the effects of work-based programmes on educational and labour market career outcomes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48261,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Education Review","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102673"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144213210","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":"2025-08-01","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":"2025-08-01","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}