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

Matthewes, Sonke and Borgna, Camilla (2025) De-tracking at the margin: how alternative secondary education pathways affect student attainment. Economics of Education Review, 104. ISSN 0272-7757

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 the Authors
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools
JEL classification:	I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education > I28 - Government Policy J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Time Allocation, Work Behavior, and Employment Determination and Creation; Human Capital; Retirement > J24 - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Date Deposited:	07 Jan 2025 10:33
Last Modified:	26 Oct 2025 02:06
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126595

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