 Post-secondary funding and the educational attainment of indigenous studentsMaggie E.C. Jones Economics of Education Review, 2023, vol. 97, issue C Abstract: This paper uses cutbacks to a post-secondary funding program for Indigenous peoples in Canada to understand how changes in the costs of higher education affect the educational attainment and labour market outcomes of Indigenous groups. I exploit exogenous variation in exposure to student aid across cohorts and ethnicities to show that increasing the costs of post-secondary education not only affects post-secondary attainment but can also lead to a sizable decrease in high school graduation rates. After reductions in targeted student aid in the late 1980s, high school graduation rates declined by five percentage points on Indian reserves. I suggest that this finding is consistent with a model of human capital acquisition in which the return to a high school degree is low. In this framework, some students complete high school in order to attend a post-secondary institution. When post-secondary education is no longer affordable, some students may no longer find it worthwhile to complete high school. In the long-run, the program cutbacks had lasting adverse effects on labour supply. Keywords: Education; Post-secondary funding; Student aid; High school graduation; Labour supply (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:97:y:2023:i:c:s027277572300122x DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102475 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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