Student Outcomes: Evidence from an Admission Reform in Stockholm

Sammanfattning: This paper analyzes what happened to compulsory school grades after they became more important for admissions to public high schools in the City of Stockholm. The City of Stockholm changed the selection mechanisms to its public high schools for the fall 2000 intake, abolishing proximity-based priority. Instead students could apply to any school with compulsory school grades as the only admission criteria. The change meant that students could be forced away from their neighborhood school, but on the other hand they could be admitted to any of the municipality's public high schools if they had good enough grades. One motivation behind the reform was to increase students' effort in compulsory school. To determine the effect of the reform on academic achievement in compulsory school, a difference-in-differences analysis is conducted using school-cohort level data 1998-2005, where the control group consists of compulsory schools in other municipalities in Stockholm County. The results indicate that the reform on aggregate had a small positive effect on compulsory school grades. However, the effect is not immediate. The results should therefore be interpreted cautiously. An analysis of heterogeneous effects reveals that schools where parents have relatively high education drive the results, suggesting that the gains of the reform on the compulsory school level were concentrated among students with relatively highly educated parents.