OEM 301 : EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND PLANNING.

Overall vision

The “Education Policy and Planning” Team shares with other parts of the Centre an interest in the effects of education on populations, societies and economies; However, we are also uniquely concerned with the inputs, pathways, and processes leading to schooling and education: the formation of human capital. Where quantitative perspectives have been brought to bear on the phenomenon of international educational development, these have tended to focus on economic analysis and policy evaluation. However, large-scale structural patterns at the population level have received surprisingly little attention. The comparative advantage of our team is the application of demographic insights and techniques to the field of international and comparative educational research. We pay particular attention to population momentum, multi-state transitions, and intergenerational transmission of economic and social capital. We combine these phenomena with sociological perspectives surrounding the structure of schooling and educational inequalities. The aim is to inject a genuine long-term population and life-cycle perspective into educational policy and scholarly debates. Our interdisciplinary team is well-balanced to advance our understanding of both methodological and substantive issues, and the connections among them.

 

Specific work plan for mid-2011 to mid-2013

During the next years, the research of the WIC team “Education Policy and Planning” will be directed towards these focal projects:

Global Education Scenarios

Our contribution to the flagship WIC project, “Science-based world population projections by age, sex and level of educational attainment”, consists in formulating global projections of future educational attainment. These will be based on a combination of statistical modeling of past trends and qualitative expert assessments of such extrapolations. This exercise will build on results of the large-scale expert survey for fertility, mortality, and migration currently underway, as adapted to the education sector.

Patterns and Drivers of Educational Expansion

One of the foundations of these projections is a careful analysis of historical patterns of educational expansion. In particular, based on a comprehensive review of existing historical time-series of educational growth, we will investigate to what extent there are consistent patterns of timing and sequencing that may be treated as a generic schema of an “education transition”, in analogy with the “demographic transition”. Without seeking a “grand theory” to explain such universal patterns, the aim is to establish to what extent feedback mechanisms may provide a system-theoretic explanation, such as the intergenerational transmission of human capital or declines in inequality due to increased opportunity. 

 

Intergenerational Education Dynamics

We will quantify and examine the consequences of the fact that — where the educational fertility gradient is negative — the education of the average child's parents grows more slowly than the education of the parental cohort as a whole, along with the positive or negative implications for equity given changing relationship between children’s education and family background. In particular, we will investigate these dynamics using census data from Latin American countries, a region where these dynamics have been pronounced, and where school reforms and polices aimed at promoting universal access to basic education and expanding high school and higher education have created expansion shocks that might serve as natural experiments. A different angle is provided by considering teachers in addition to parents. In particular, the constraints and opportunities created by the differences in composition of teacher and student cohorts, will be examined. One example is the feasibility in European countries of making the ethnic diversity of the teaching force resemble that of the student body. Another example is the implications of rapid expansions in teacher training for quality.

 

Higher Education Economics from a Life-Cycle Perspective

Another major project addresses questions specific to tertiary education. The constraints to expansion there differ from those at lower levels of schooling. In particular, economic aspects play a greater role. Part of the answer to whether tertiary participation will continue to rise or level off well below universal levels depends on how societies decide to fund higher education in the twenty-first century. The feasibility and fairness of different models for private contributions depend crucially on assumptions about future tertiary participation, returns, and impacts on social transfers. Our team will evaluate the sensitivity of existing and novel policy proposals on these parameters using estimates and projections of economic activity for OECD countries arising from the work of other WIC teams. A sub-project in this context will examine the implications of population ageing and increasing old-age labour force participation on the average “vintage” of training among workers.

 

Modelling Educational Inequality and Flows

One cluster of interrelated projects deals with indicators, measurement and tools. In particular, the aim is to fill a number of gaps in the “toolbox” of educational statistics by exploiting the existence of well-established solutions to similar measurement problems in demography. Examples include inequality indices for the distribution of educational participation in a population and the production of “model school progression tables”, which can be used both in policy making and projection specification. These progression tables will provide a full set of reasonable age-, sex-, and grade-specific student flow rates based on a limited number of observations, in analogy with “model life tables” in mortality. This contribution also involves modeling the various pathways through formal education – in particular, enrollment, dropout and retention events – which vary according to age, sex and socio-economic status.  Such estimates can be performed for a sub-set of countries that are illustrative of their larger regions.

 

Disaggregation of Demographic Indicators by Education

Frequently, demographic statistics are not available in a form disaggregated by level of educational attainment. We will pursue the development of techniques to estimate such disaggregations from aggregate data in the face of uncertainty, by incorporating prior knowledge within a Bayesian framework. The cross-links with project 3 of the Health and Mortality group, which tackles a similar problem, will be exploited.