School tracking and access to higher education among disadvantaged groups

When students are tracked into vocational and academic secondary schools, access to higher education is usually restricted to those who were selected into the academic track. Postponing such tracking may increase the relative educational attainment of disadvantaged students if they have additional time in school to catch up with their more privileged counterparts. On the other hand, if ability and expectations are fairly well set by an early age, postponing tracking during adolescence may not have much e¤ect. This paper exploits an educational reform in Romania to examine the impact of postponing tracking on the proportion of disadvantaged students graduating from university using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We show that, although students from poor, rural areas and with less educated parents were signi…cantly more likely to …nish an academic track and become eligible to apply for university after the reform, this did not translate into an increase in university completion. Our …ndings indicate that simply postponing tracking, without increasing the slots available in university, is not su¢ cient to improve access to higher education for disadvantaged groups. Email: [email protected] and [email protected] respectively. We would like to thank Steve Pischke and Miguel Urquiola for helpful comments. All errors are our own.