School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment
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NBER Working Paper No. 17438
Issued in September 2011, Revised in July 2013
NBER Program(s):Children, Economics of Education, Labor Studies, Public Economics
We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school. Using rich administrative data on peers, teachers, course offerings and other inputs, we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality. Gains in attainment are concentrated among girls. Girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college-preparatory course-taking, while boys do not.
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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17438
Published: “School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment” (with Tom Kane, Justine Hastings and Doug Staiger). 2014. American Economic Review, 104(3): 991-1014. citation courtesy of 