High School Accessibility: Increasing years of compulsory schooling or modify its modality?

Oporto

Congreso; XXIX Meeting of the Economics of Education Association; 2022

Economics of Education Association (AEDE)

Over the past 20 years, Argentina introduced two reforms to the educational system. The first one, in 1993, increased compulsory years of schooling (from 7 to 9) and modified the structure of primary and secondary education. The last reform was introduced in 2006 and it also increased the years of compulsory education (from 9 to 13); however, in this case, two possible structures were enabled for the primary-secondary education, allowing each province the adoption of one of these modalities, and which were adopted asynchronously. The main objective of this study is to quantify the effect of the last reform in the characteristics of individuals educational access, by means of 5 categories with preferential order. For this reason, using recent microdata on individuals, we applied an ordered multinomial logit model, in which the possible categories represent the different conditions of educational access, thus measuring the impact of the reform on the probability of: (1) dropping out, (2) remaining at school over-aged, (3) remaining at school, (4) finishing secondary education, and (5) continuing to higher education (tertiary, university and/or postgraduate). Preliminary results allow us to identify that the fact of having been reached by the reform modestly improves the probabilities of educational access, especially in the reduction of dropouts and over-aged students. Nevertheless, when considering the different modalities adopted by the provinces, the effects of the law are significantly more important in those jurisdictions that opted for a scheme with a smaller but more specialized secondary school, as opposed to their peers that implemented a more extensive but more generalist secondary school.