Yes, You Can! Effects of Transparent Admission Standards on High School Track Choice: A Randomized Field Experiment.

High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track in high school simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a randomized field experiment that communicate...

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Publicado en:Social Forces Vol. 101; no. 1; pp. 341 - 369
Autores principales: Keller, Tamás, Takács, Károly, Elwert, Felix
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Sep2022
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Yes, You Can! Effects of Transparent Admission Standards on High School Track Choice: A Randomized Field Experiment.
      aug:
        au:
          Keller, Tamás
          Takács, Károly
          Elwert, Felix
        affil:
          Computational Social Science - Research Center for Educational and Network Studies , Centre for Social Sciences
          Institute of Economics , Centre for Economic and Regional Studies
          TÁRKI Social Research Institute
          The Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) , Linköping University Computational Social Science - Research Center for Educational and Network Studies, Centre for Social Sciences
          Department of Sociology & Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics , University of Wisconsin-Madison
      su:
        Educational standards
        Curriculum
        Education research
        Secondary education
        Heterogeneity
        School admission
      sug:
        subj:
          Educational standards
          Curriculum
          Education research
          Secondary education
          Heterogeneity
          Educational Support Services
          All Other Miscellaneous Schools and Instruction
          Administration of Education Programs
          Elementary and Secondary Schools
          School admission
      ab: High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track in high school simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a randomized field experiment that communicated the admission standards of local secondary schools on the academic track to students in Hungary before the application deadline. We targeted the subset of students ("seeds") who occupied the most central position in the classroom-social networks, aiming to detect both direct effects on the track choice of targeted seeds and spillover effects on their untreated peers. We found neither a direct effect nor a spillover effect on students' applications or admissions on average. Further analyses, however, revealed theoretically plausible heterogeneity in the direct causal effect of the intervention on the track choice of targeted seeds. Providing information about admission standards increased applications and admissions to secondary schools on the academic track among seeds who had a pre-existing interest in the academic track but were unsure of their chances of admission. This demonstrates that publicizing admissions standards can set students on a more ambitious educational trajectory. We discuss the implications for theory and policy.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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