Pushed out of the education system: using a natural experiment to evaluate consequences for boys
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Pushed out of the education system: using a natural experiment to evaluate consequences for boys Kira Solveig Larsen 1
& Lars
Højsgaard Andersen 2 & Britt Østergaard Larsen 1
Accepted: 2 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Objectives To examine the short-term effects of admission requirements for upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) on enrollment and criminal offending among academically low-achieving boys. Methods We apply multi-group difference-in-differences models to full population data and analyze an educational policy reform in Denmark (N = 60,759). Results The reform caused a 16 percentage points lower enrollment in VET among academically low-achieving boys, and their risk of being charged with a crime increased by up to two percentage points 9 months after the end of compulsory school. However, after 12 months, the effect on criminal charges disappeared. Conclusion In the education-crime nexus, educational enrollment in upper secondary education is an understudied margin, which has important implications for both scholars and policy-makers. Limitations include the short follow-up period and that the analyses examine effects for boys only. Keywords Difference-in-differences model . Education . Natural experiment . Registry
data . Policy reform
Introduction Given that educational attainment influences health, employment, and income, it plays a significant role in determining individuals’ long-term outcomes (e.g., Card 1999; Oreopoulos and Salvanes 2011). Not surprisingly, there is a large criminological literature evaluating the effects of, for example, dropout from education on subsequent
* Kira Solveig Larsen [email protected]
1
Danish Center for Social Science Research, 1052 Copenhagen, Denmark
2
ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit, 1472 Copenhagen, Denmark
K. S. Larsen et al.
crime. In general, these dropout studies support evidence of the education-crime link (e.g., Bäckman 2017; Elliott and Voss 1974; Farrington et al. 1986; Thornberry et al. 1985), although a few studies find more ambiguous results (Bachman et al. 1978; Jarjoura 1993) or no long-term effect of dropout on crime (Sweeten et al. 2009). Missing from these dropout studies, however, is the question of the crime-reducing benefits of enrolling in education. Thus, as well as other long-term outcomes of education, it is important to examine the effects of educational enrollment on criminal behavior in order to achieve a richer scholarly understanding of the potential benefits of education and of how to prevent criminal careers. To analyze the education-crime relationship, studies have used a range of methodological approaches, such as propensity score matching (e.g., Bäckman 2017) and other advanced quantitative methods (e.g., Bjerk 2012; Sweeten et al. 2009). The present study contributes to a recent line of research using natural experiments to examine the effects of education on crime along two lines. First, most of these studies provide knowledge on the effects of the length of education, school starting
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