School Choice and Educational Mobility

Abstract

Merit-based school choice often presents an unfulfilled promise of educational mobility. In Ghana, where a standardized exam determines secondary school admission, students from low-performing elementary schools apply to weaker secondary schools than equally qualified students from high-performing elementary schools. This paper investigates why students with the same academic potential make different application choices. I outline a theoretical model and empirical strategy to analyze heterogeneity in student demand. Using administrative data, I show that disadvantaged students value school proximity more and live farther away from high-performing schools, suggesting the interaction between demand and the spatial distribution of schools limits educational mobility.

New Methodological Approach to Classify Educational Institutions—A Case Study on Romanian High Schools

“…Our multinomial model excludes factors outside the educational system that may be of high relevance, such as students' subjective preference regarding high schools and socio-economic variables such as diverse costs regarding education or transportation. This only underlines the ecological interdependency between education and the rest of the social environment-economy, governance, and general development-and brings an important addition to what has been studied so far, regarding admission, besides topics like educational mobility and school choice by analysing the heterogeneity in students' demands [21][22][23][24]. It can be stated, moreover, that few studies are conducted on data from Romania regarding the options and preferences of students when it comes to high schools [25], and much less are related to rankings and classifications [26].…”

Is Four Better Than Three? The Effect of The 4-Year High School Policy on Academic Performance In Ghana

“…The CSSPS uses an algorithm to rank aggregate scores obtained in the student's best six BECE subjects. After that, students are placed in their highest-ranked selected schools subject to the number of available seats supplied by the high schools and student preferences (Ajayi 2021). Students successfully placed in high schools accept their placements by reporting to their respective campuses to begin their high school education.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to comprehensively investigate the impact of Ghana's 4-year high school policy on academic performance. Ghana's rapidly evolving high school education system has attracted keen interest from researchers, especially regarding the country's Computerized School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) and the free senior high school policies (Ajayi 2021, Duflo et al 2021. However, there are no rigorous studies on the effects of SHS duration policies on secondary school outcomes.…”

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching

“…This limit, which binds for the majority of students, introduces strong incentives to mitigate the risk of rejection from all listed programs, and the optimal strategy for choosing a portfolio of ranked schools depends crucially on the correlation structure of admission decisions (Shorrer 2019). As shown in Ajayi (2013), a substantial fraction of students submit rank-order lists with features that are ruled out by out optimal behavior. For example, 92% of students ranked schools in an order different than their selectivity, creating situations where rejection by the "back-up" option is assured conditional on rejection by the higher-ranked option.…”