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

Sonke Matthewes and Camilla Borgna

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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; difference-in-differences; educational expansion; event study; regional inequality; school supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2025-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Published in Economics of Education Review, 28, February, 2025, 104. ISSN: 0272-7757

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