| Summary: | In this dissertation, I explore barriers to educational attainment faced by Canadian
youth from three different perspectives. The first paper, which is joint with David
Green and Giovanni Gallipoli, uses an extended version of an unobserved factor
model to investigate the factors that influence a youth’s decision to drop out of
high-school. Our results support three main conclusions. First, ability at age 15
plays an important role in dropping out. Second, parental valuation of education
has a substantial impact on medium and low ability teenagers. Third, parental
education has no direct effect on dropping out once we control for ability and
parental valuation of education.
The second paper poses the question ”Can neighbourhoods change the decisions
of youth on the margin of university participation?” I use the fraction of
adults who have at least a Bachelors degree in a small geographic area surrounding
a youth’s home to proxy one source of potential peers and role models. Results
suggest that at the mean neighbourhoods have a substantial impact on the likelihood
of attending university.
I further explore this finding by estimating the marginal effect of neighbourhood
characteristics at different points on the socio-economic distribution, and
the distribution of reading test scores. One striking finding is that while university
participation among youth from families with university degrees is unaffected
by neighbourhoods, the marginal effect of neighbourhoods is largest for the highskilled
youth from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
The final paper evaluates the impact of a post-secondary preparatory course on
high school achievement. BC AVID, a pilot project implemented with a random
assignment design, encouraged students whose grade 8 grades were within the B
and C range to enrol in advanced classes and provided academic support through
an elective course. I find that while the program increased the chances that students
enrolled in an advanced math course, it also increased the likelihood that students
failed the provincial examination. BC AVID did, however, help students pass their
course work and as a result more students obtained credit for the advanced math
course. === Arts, Faculty of === Vancouver School of Economics === Graduate
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