Do school reforms shape study behavior at university? Evidence from an instructional time reform
Abstract
Early-life environments can have long-lasting developmental effects. Interestingly, research on how school reforms affect later-life study behavior has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigated a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in most German federal states. We analyzed this quasi-experiment in a difference-in-differences framework using representative large-scale survey data on 71,426 students who attended university between 1998 and 2016. We found negative effects of reform exposure on hours spent attending classes and on self-study, and a larger time gap between school completion and higher education entry. Our results support the view that research should examine unintended long-term effects of school reforms on individual life courses.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.09843,
title = {Do school reforms shape study behavior at university? Evidence from an instructional time reform},
author = {Jakob Schwerter and Nicolai Netz and Nicolas Hübner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.09843},
year = {2022}
}