De-tracking at the margin: How alternative secondary education pathways affect student attainment

Sönke Hendrik Matthewes and Camilla Borgna

Economics of Education Review, 2025, vol. 104, issue C

Abstract: This paper estimates how marginal increases in the flexibility of between-school tracking affect student attainment by exploiting the addition of non-selective ‘comprehensive schools’ and hybrid ‘vocational high schools’ to Germany’s tracked school system. These schools opened up alternative pathways to the university-entrance certificate, which traditionally could only be obtained at academic-track schools. We use administrative records to compile a county-level panel of school supply and attainment for 13 cohorts between 1995 and 2007. Cross-sectionally, the supplies of all three school types awarding the university-entrance certificate correlate positively with its attainment. However, for academic-track and comprehensive schools this association is not robust to the inclusion of regional controls, suggesting that it reflects regional differences in educational demand rather than supply-side effects. For vocational high schools, in contrast, we find robust evidence for positive attainment effects not only in cross-sectional and two-way fixed-effects panel regressions, but also in an event-study design that exploits the quasi-random timing of new school openings. Likely reasons for their success are that they lower the (perceived) costs of educational upgrading for late-bloomers, and their hybrid curriculum, which may retain students in general schooling who would otherwise enter vocational training.

Keywords: Ability tracking; School supply; Regional inequality; Educational expansion; Difference-in-differences; Event study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277572400102X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecoedu:v:104:y:2025:i:c:s027277572400102x

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102608

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().