Incentivising Specific Combinations of Subjects – Does It Make Any Difference to University Access?
Jake Anders,
Morag Henderson,
Vanessa Moulton and
Alice Sullivan
National Institute Economic Review, 2018, vol. 243, issue 1, R37-R52
Abstract:
A major part of the 2010–15 UK government's education reforms in England was a focus on the curriculum that pupils study from ages 14–16. Most high profile was the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) performance measure for schools, incentivising study of “subjects the Russell Group identifies as key for university study†( Gibb, 2011 ). However, there does not appear to be good quantitative evidence about the importance of studying such a set of subjects, per se . This paper sets out to analyse this question, considering whether otherwise similar young people who study specific sets of subjects (full set for EBacc-eligibility, two or more sciences, foreign languages, applied subjects) to age 16 have different probabilities of entering university, and specifically a high-status university. It compares results from regression modelling and propensity score matching, taking advantage of rich survey data from a recent cohort of young people in England. We find that conditional differences in university entry attributable to subject choice are, at most, small.
Keywords: subject choice: English Baccalaureate; accountability measures; university access (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://ner.sagepub.com/content/243/1/R37.abstract (text/html)
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:sae:niesru:v:243:y:2018:i:1:p:r37-r52
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in National Institute Economic Review from National Institute of Economic and Social Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().