The impact of education on personality: Evidence from a German high school reform

Abstract

This paper investigates the short-term eects of a reduction in the length of upper secondary school on students’ personality traits using a state-level high school reform in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, the number of years of the academic secondary school track (Gymnasium) was gradually reduced from nine to eight in most of Germany’s federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. This enabled students to obtain a university entrance qualication (Abitur) after a total of only 12 years of schooling. We exploit the variation in the length of high school over time and across states to identify the eect of schooling on students’ Big Five personality traits and on their locus of control. Using rich data on adolescents and young adults from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, our estimates show that shortening the high school track caused students on average to be less emotionally stable. Moreover, our estimates point to important heterogeneous eects. The personality of male students and students from disrupted families changed more strongly following the reform: they became more agreeable and more extroverted, respectively. We conclude that the educational system plays a role in shaping adolescents’ personality traits. We show that this inuence is largely driven by the increased learning intensity due to the higher