Ranking high schools using university student performance in Italy

Massimiliano Bratti,Enrico Lippo,Carmen Aina

doi:10.1007/s40888-020-00208-2

Abstract

The Eduscopio project is the first attempt to build school performance indicators based on the university performance of high school leavers in Italy. It provides stakeholders (students and their families) with publicly available school performance indicators, and school rankings. A potential weakness of Eduscopio is that it relies on first-year student performance only. In this study, we extend its methodology to include longer-term academic outcomes, such as cumulative third-year performance and the probability of on-time graduation. Our results demonstrate that differences in university students’ performance across high schools are not temporary and limited to the first-year, but persist in the following academic years, and that the ranking of high schools based on longer-term indicators remains rather stable. Moreover, our analysis highlights non-negligible differences of between-school track dispersion in the Eduscopio index across cities, which hints on geographical differences in student selection mechanisms into school tracks or in the level of dispersion of school value added within tracks.

Highlights

Making conscious educational choices requires having information on the costs and benefits of each available alternative
The procedure followed by Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli (FGA) to compute school rankings consists of three steps (Bernardi and De Simone 2018): 12 In the Italian HE system each exam is associated with a given number of CFUs, and each CFU corresponds to 25 hours of student workload
High schools are ranked according to the university performance of the students who enrolled in Italian universities

Summary

Introduction

Making conscious educational choices requires having information on the costs and benefits of each available alternative. The great attention received by this web portal proves its growing relevance as a useful tool for secondary school choice in the Italian context, where the decision of which high school track to enroll is made at a relative early age (i.e. usually 13), namely during the last year of the middle school (Vuri 2018) As it has been shown in several studies (see among others, Bauer and Riphahn 2006; Hanushek and Wößmann 2006; Dustmann 2004), choosing at a early age the high school track reduces intergenerational educational mobility, with children of less educated parents more likely to enroll in non-academic secondary school tracks, undermining their subsequent educational achievements.

Eduscopio “at a glance”

Sample selection criteria

Outcome variables

The methodology of Eduscopio

Step 1 results

Step 2 results

Step 3 results

Findings

Concluding remarks