TY  - JOUR
AU  - Malamud,Ofer
AU  - Pop-Eleches,Cristian
TI  - School Tracking and Access to Higher Education Among Disadvantaged Groups
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16914
PY  - 2011
Y2  - March 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16914
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16914.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ofer Malamud
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-3382
Fax: 773/702-0926
E-Mail: malamud@uchicago.edu

Cristian Pop-Eleches
The Steinhardt School of Culture,
Education, and Human Development
New York University
82 Washington Square E
New York, NY 10095
Tel: (212) 998-4500
E-Mail: cpe3@nyu.edu
AB  - When students are tracked into vocational and academic secondary schools, access to higher education is usually restricted to those who completed an academic track. Postponing such tracking may increase university attendance among disadvantaged students if additional time in school enables them to catch up with their more privileged counterparts. However, if ability and expectations are fairly well set by an early age, postponing tracking during adolescence may not have much effect. This paper exploits an educational reform in Romania to examine the impact of postponing tracking on the proportion of disadvantaged students graduating from university using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We show that, although students from poor, rural areas and with less educated parents were significantly more likely to finish an academic track and become eligible to apply for university after the reform, this did not translate into an increase in university completion. Our findings indicate that simply postponing tracking, without increasing the slots available in university, is not sufficient to improve access to higher education for disadvantaged groups.
ER  -