Learning to earn: more stringent high-school graduation requirements may reduce students' chances of earning a diploma. But higher standards also improve their ability to find a job - Research

Education Next, Summer, 2003 by Thomas S. Dee

There is also evidence that educational attainment can be influenced by the relative size of a birth cohort. At the college level, this can occur if enrollment space at local colleges and universities is not expanded to accommodate temporary population booms, At the secondary level, larger student populations may increase class sizes and strain school resources, thereby lowering school quality and reducing the benefits of staying in school. For these reasons I introduced an adjustment for the size of students' birth cohorts. I also included a measure of the real costs of postsecondary tuition based on the in-state rate at "lower level" state colleges and universities when the respondents were 17 years old. Finally, as a control for within-stare changes in socioeconomic conditions, I matched respondents to the poverty rates in their states when they were 17 years old.

One further note: I performed several tests to check whether my results were indeed more reliable than results using comparisons of students across states rather than within the same state. One method is to estimate the effect of a state-level policy that, in theory, should be totally irrelevant to educational outcomes. In this case I chose whether a state had any executions when the student was 18 years of age. In the across-state comparison, capital punishment generated large and statistically significant reductions in the probability of high-school completion and college entrance, clearly an implausible result. By contrast, the effects of capital punishment as estimated in the within-state comparisons were negligible, as they should be. This strongly suggests the increased reliability associated with using within-state comparisons.

Education and Employability

For all students, the minimum-competency exams showed no statistically significant effect on the probability of graduating from high school. By contrast, higher curricular standards reduced students' probability of graduating from high school by 0.5 percentage points (see Figure 1), An effect of this size represents a 3 percent increase in the probability of dropping our. Another way to frame the size of this estimate is to note that high-school completion rates among 18- to 24-year-olcts increased from 82.8 percent in 1972 to 86.5 percent in 2000. My results suggest that in stares that adopted high curricular standards these average gains were 14 percent less than they otherwise would have been. (Note that these percentages--as well as the data set I used--considered students who passed the General Educational Development, or GED, test to be high-school graduates. Thus my findings may actually understate the true reform-induced reduction in high-school completion.)

For all students and for subgroups broken down by race and gender, the first-wave reforms had statistically insignificant effects on the probability of entering college. This makes sense since these reforms were not aimed at the relatively high-achieving students who are considering college.