Spatial inequality of opportunity in access to secondary education in nineteenth-century Spain

Abstract In this paper, secondary education graduation age is proposed as a way of measuring the obstacles students had to face to acquire education in historical contexts. Using a novel historical source, I find that students from rural areas bore increasingly larger obstacles than those from cities. The size of the municipality of origin exerts a larger negative effect on students who graduated later in life—that is, those who bore larger impediments to study. These results suggest that a phenomenon of spatial isolation from knowledge created a problem of access to secondary education.