Mass Secondary Schooling and the State: The Role of State Compulsion in the High School Movement

Claudia D. Goldin and Lawrence Katz

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: In the three decades after 1910 the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools soared from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating increased from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more stringent. It might appear from the timing that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate that possibility using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments and also the micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. The expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 can, at best, account for 6 to 7 percent of the increase in high school enrollments and can account for about the same portion of the increase in the eventual educational attainment for the affected cohorts over the period. The “state,†in the form of localities, was already providing educational resources in the United States. Compulsory education laws had larger impacts in other nations where the laws compelled the state to expand educational resources.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Published in Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth: Geography, Institutions, and the Knowledge Economy (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33901525/67454082.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Mass Secondary Schooling and the State: The Role of State Compulsion in the High School Movement (2008)
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:hrv:faseco:33901525

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().