Walking the line: Does crossing a high stakes exam threshold matter for labour market outcomes?

Oliver Anderson ()
Additional contact information
Oliver Anderson: UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities

No 22-05, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: This paper offers new insight into the link between success in high stakes exams and subsequent education and labour market outcomes. It is the first study to look at the impact of crossing an important high stakes threshold on both academic and vocational education choices and ultimately early career labour market outcomes. It does so by comparing those either side of an important threshold in the English education system at the end of compulsory schooling which was commonly regarded as the minimum benchmark for continuing into post-compulsory education. I find that crossing this threshold led to a 5.8-6.0 percentage point increase in the proportion of men and women continuing to the next education level. Crossing the threshold had a positive effect on earnings for women (3.4 percent) but not for men. The results for men can be explained by the fact that more marginal learners, who just crossed the threshold, were more likely to go on to low return academic qualifications, while those not crossing the threshold instead opted for relatively high return vocational education. I extend the analysis to other thresholds to test the uniqueness of the salience of this threshold on labour market outcomes (for women) and find that crossing other thresholds leads to better labour market outcomes. Equally, this can be explained by women crossing different thresholds leading to a greater likelihood of continuing in academic education, which has positive returns.

JEL-codes: I20 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2022-04, Revised 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp22-05r1.pdf Revised version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucl:cepeow:22-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Anders ().