The zero returns to additional compulsory schooling rest on the claim that students in the academic stream do not have the labor market-relevant skills upon leaving school. Institutional factors more common in European labor markets, such as relatively high minimum wages and high unionization, may also affect returns to compulsory schooling by, for example, raising the earnings from relatively low levels of schooling.
Similarly, the Nordic countries often changed the minimum schooling level to reflect underlying trends within their population i. On this question—the role of the underlying system and cohort trends in participation—recent research compares schooling age reforms in the UK and France. In many European countries, the school curricula are often structured to allow each level of study to lead to a specific credential, and, in the author's interpretation, the changes in England and Wales yielded positive wage returns because they brought the cohort to a year in which a credential was typically taken—in effect a quality enhancement from the additional year.
To summarize this important question—what is the rate of return to earnings from compulsory schooling? Even allowing for the variance in returns observed in the literature, the returns from compulsory schooling may still imply poor choices by some individuals. But the estimation of the return to compulsory schooling points to a set of important policy questions.
The focus of policy to encourage educational participation among low socio-economic status SES cohorts is often pecuniary in nature, with low participation viewed as being the impact of a financial constraint acting as a barrier to further participation. However, one interpretation of the high rate of return to compulsory schooling is that it provides an estimate of the discount rate being applied by early-leavers it indicates that early-leavers value the present over the future.
The payment may change the trade-off between return and risk for youths with a high discount rate for time. As an example of such a policy from the UK, Educational Maintenance Allowances EMAs provided a sizable means-tested cash benefit conditional on participation in post-compulsory age 16 in this instance education. Of course, one cannot be sure of the extent to which this extra education is valuable to these participants.
If unmotivated students are encouraged to remain in school, a conditional cash transfer policy such as the EMA may be an inefficient use of resources. But the findings suggest that a better explanation for dropout behavior may be that early leavers are myopic, and that there is a limited potential for money to encourage post-compulsory participation [8].
This creates a very interesting challenge for policymakers to change how early leavers value the options they face. A behavioral approach to encouraging participation may be more successful. For example, recent US research uses an experimental design to examine the impact of assistance on addressing the complexity of the financial aid process for college applications.
In the spirit of this research on the behavioral economics of education, compulsory schooling laws serve as a means to set and alter the expectations of students. Inequity across the socio-economic gradient in key outcomes for children—including educational attainment—is the focus of considerable policy attention. While the intergenerational relationship between children and their parents is well-known, establishing the causal links is important for targeting policy recommendations.
The implication is that the increase in parental schooling has a positive impact on parental earnings, which feeds through to their children's schooling attainment via better schools, better home environments, and so on. Given an average gap in education between dropouts and non-dropouts of up to two years, this translates into an increase of approximately 0.
Based on US Census data and state-by-state variation in compulsory schooling laws and their changes, one study examines the role of the change in parental education on their children's tendency to repeat high school grades. This basic result is robust across other specifications and schooling measures such as dropout rates [9]. Despite the widely observed correlation between better health including specific biomarkers such as those for heart disease or diabetes and more education, the causal nature of this relationship is harder to pin down.
For this reason, the exogenous change from a compulsory schooling law can provide useful evidence on the health and education relationship. Based on an analysis of compulsory schooling changes in seven European countries Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands , one additional year of schooling decreases the probability of self-reported poor health by about 5 percentage points for men, and by between 4 and 6.
Using various UK data sets, one study finds quite modest returns to actual physiological measures of health outcomes such as blood pressure , mortality rates, as well as self-reported health outcomes and health behaviors. The authors suggest that the additional schooling may come too early to have a lasting impact on health choices and outcomes, making the causal relationship impossible to determine [10].
This is consistent with the view that reforms which happened in the early part of the century had a larger effect on health outcomes such as mortality because they reduced the likelihood that children would be employed in physically intensive employment, which would lead to poor physical health later in life. A related—but contrasting—interpretation drawing on the early education investment literature is that the change in schooling actually comes too late. Overall there appears to be weak evidence to motivate a policy such as compulsory schooling on the grounds of a lasting physical health impact.
A somewhat different but related outcome is mental health. Research based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe SHARE database of older adults in Europe, and the same country reforms discussed in [2] , examines the impact of compulsory schooling on depression and cognition as measured by a word recall test. The additional schooling reduces the probability of suffering depression by 6.
These findings support earlier work on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing ELSA which shows a positive and significant causal effect on old-age memory of less-educated people based on the impact of the UK reforms.
A promising related strand of research uses compulsory schooling to identify the role education plays in key cognitive choices. However, it also has a significant impact on financial decisions—improving financial literacy.
More-educated individuals have fewer financial complications, higher credit scores, and lower probability of mortgage re-financing.
The probability of having any retirement income rises by 5. Interestingly, these results control for whether or not the student has studied financial literacy at school through courses in personal finance, but this additional training does not have a significant impact on financial decision making. In another application, compulsory schooling changes provide a potential identification strategy to examine how education and crime are related. A number of channels exist for education to influence crime outcomes.
For instance, increased earnings raise the opportunity costs of illegal behavior. Education may also limit the time available for criminal activity. Although some critics of public education are now questioning the value of compulsory schooling for all children, this concept is deeply ingrained in American history and social values. The first compulsory education law in this country was enacted in in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritan notion of education as a moral, social obligation was thus given the sanction of law, a pattern later followed by nineteenth century crusaders for free public education.
By , all states had passed school attendance legislation, although until the s, many were unsuccessful in enforcing their compulsory schooling laws. However, as the population increased, and as the demand for well-trained labor grew, the bureaucratic machinery for enforcement was created.
If he is unable to educate his children the state should assist him—if unwilling, it should compel him. General education is as much more certain, and much less expensive, than military array…. His report on Prussian education was highly influential among the educationists, and the majority followed his lead.
Unhappily, this is not the case, particularly in great cities. Although it is lamentable to be forced to use constraint, it is almost always necessary to commence with it. In addition to the more grandiose aims of compulsion, the educationists were also concerned to increase their personal power and pelf. As directors of the educational establishment, they drove systematically to extend their power and to induce or force an ever widening circle of pupils into their schools.
As Professor E. West points out, the drive of educationists and teachers to make the public schools free succeeded in New York State in Before that, the public schools had been supported by tuition, and therefore their customers were limited, as in all areas of the economy, by the need to pay for the cost of the service.
Hence the drive of these educational suppliers to force the taxpayers to pay for, and thereby expand the demand for, their own services. The argument sued before was that the lack of universal attendance in the public schools was due to the existence of poverty.
When attendance still fell short of the universal even after , the educationists changed their argument and denounced parents for being willful, ignorant, and indifferent to the benefits of the education being offered free to their children.
Hence the need for the coercive device of compulsory attendance, which the educationists were able to drive through the New York legislature in By the end of the nineteenth century, the educationists had built a public school system that came under increasing criticism for its heavy bureaucracy, its system of crippling rules, and its insistence on uniformity, regularity and conformity with these universal rules.
Curricula and teaching methods were increasingly standardized, thus ignoring the enormous differences between groups and individuals. We now begin to see why it should not be a source of wonder that the poorer people and the working classes were the major opponents of the new public school program.
Michael Katz, writing about the successful struggle in , in Beverly, Massachusetts, to abolish the public high school, points out that the wealthy groups were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the public high school while the working classes and poorer groups—the farmers, shoemakers, mariners, fishermen, and laborers—were almost unanimously in favor of its abolition.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the public school system had achieved its maximum impact throughout the country; compulsory attendance laws, furthermore, had swept through state after state, and by every state in the recalcitrant South had been conquered by the system of compulsion.
The public school system was ready for its next transformation, for the consolidation of its dominance and for the intensification of its control by a ruling elite.
In recent years, historians, led by Samuel P. Hays and James Weinstein, have begun to show the corollary impact of the Progressive movement on the workings of municipal government.
Part of this shift of power away from a decentralized, warn and neighborhood representation included a shift of control of the local school boards as well. An example is the city of Pittsburgh. In , the Pennsylvania legislature went over the heads of the city an imposed a new city charter and a new school board system upon Pittsburgh.
The educationist and educational historian Elwood P. Cubberley put the case for urban school centralization in a forthright manner:. Men who are successful in the handling or large business undertakings—manufacturers, merchants, bankers, contractors, and professional men or large practice—would perhaps come first. Once again, one of the leading reasons for tightening central control of the public schools was the troublesome wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; more than ever it was important to the educationists to direct, assimilate, and control the new immigrants, and to mould them into the older and more homogeneous system.
Immigrants were expected to abandon their previous language, as well as their often constrasting and diverse values and cultures.
It was not an easy task; immigrants often clung to their own culture, and the pesky Catholics often insisted on establishing their own parochial schools. Quantitatively, the educationists have achieved a success in the twentieth century beyond their fondest expectations. An increasingly large proportion of Americans have been induced or dragooned into grammar school, high school, college, and now even graduate school.
Qualitatively, the success story of the educationists is open to question.
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