Abstract
Since the 1990s, the Swedish education market has gone through a dramatic transformation due to the introduction of voucher-funded independent schools. We make use of data on school applications to condition on student preferences for independent versus public education, and estimate a positive relationship between independent upper secondary school attendance and grades, graduation rates, and post-secondary education. We however also find strong indications of more lenient grading standards in independent schools, especially in schools organized as for-profit entities and in schools with a low share of qualified teachers. Our results suggest that, although independent school attendance seems to benefit the individual students in terms of higher grades and increased transition to post-secondary studies, grade inflation in the Swedish upper secondary independent schools may be a serious problem.
Highlights
The effectiveness of upper secondary school determines the quality of the academic abilities supplied to universities, the quality of the vocational abilities supplied to the labor market, as well as individual labor market prospects in general
In a robustness analysis, which was conducted on our preferred value-added estimation (VAM)-specification (Column 2 in Tables 4.A–4.C), we found that the results are robust to correcting for multiple hypotheses following the procedure proposed in Hochberg (1988) and used by e.g. Banerjee et al (2015). (The results are presented in sections C5.1 in Appendix C.) We investigated the robustness of the baseline VAM-estimates to unobservable variables bias following Oster (2019), who in turn builds on Altonji et al (2005)
Evaluation of the educational value added of independent schools in Sweden is a complicated matter: The student achievement indicators that are available for the full population are assessed by the teachers, and the previous literature has indicated that independent schools in general have more generous grading standards than the public schools, meaning that teacher-assessed
Summary
The effectiveness of upper secondary school determines the quality of the academic abilities supplied to universities, the quality of the vocational abilities supplied to the labor market, as well as individual labor market prospects in general. We contribute to a growing international research literature on school vouchers by estimating the impact of attending a Swedish independent upper secondary school on a range of academic and short-run labor market outcomes. The data enable us to carry out two alternative estimation strategies: First, a value-added estimation (VAM) which, in addition to “standard” student background characteristics (demographic and family characteristics, previous academic attainment), controls for preferences for independent/public schools as reflected in school applications. The results from our conditional-on-observables analysis using VAMs suggest that attending an independent instead of a public upper secondary school has a positive average effect on: students’ final GPA, standardized test scores in English and Swedish, and the likelihood of graduating on time. Our results using VAMs are robust to the use of different sampling and matching approaches, to bias-correction as suggested by Oster (2019), and to multiple hypothesis correction of p-values
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