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Children in Liberia receive 2.2 learning-adjusted years of schooling, one of the lowest levels of educational attainment in the world. We study one approach to address low enrollment and low rates of learning: a 10-month accelerated learning program run by the Luminos Fund to help out-of-school children catch up to grade level. We conducted a randomized evaluation of the program across 100 communities in Liberia. We find that the program had large effects on reading and numeracy skills for out-of-school children, and that children in the program catch up to the learning levels of children in government schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the impact of racial matching between teacher and student on the academic performance of middle school students in Brazil. The data comes from an educational evaluation survey carried out by the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation – Ministry of Education of Brazil (FUNDAJ 2020), which followed the same cohort of students in the sixth and seventh years of public middle schools, between the years of 2017 and 2018. To address to the potential source of endogeneity, we use FUNDAJ panel data to estimate student fixed effects models, which makes it possible to compare students who have one race-matched and one non-race-matched teacher within the same subject in the two years of data. The results show that, when placed in a situation of racial equality with their Portuguese and Mathematics teachers, Black students will present better grades in both subjects, by about 30% of their average grade. The results also show evidence of heterogeneity, with stronger effects in female students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new measure of human capital, calculated as a cohort-weighted average of the quality of education (PISA scores) and the quantity of education (mean years of schooling). Contrary to the existing studies, the relative weights of quality and quantity are estimated (and not calibrated). The quality of education is estimated to be three to four times more important for education than the quantity of education. The new measure has a strong link to productivity, which materialises with long lags. Productivity gains are much greater from improvements in the quality than quantity component of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relationship between locus of control and both educational attainment and college aspirations in adolescence, focusing on the potential channels through which locus of control may influence these outcomes. Even after controlling for a comprehensive set of socio-demographic factors and cognitive skills, there remains a strong correlation between locus of control, college aspirations, and attendance. We show that effort is an essential channel through which locus of control operates. Mediation analysis further reveals that this mechanism is more influential than future expectations in determining high-school graduation, college aspirations, and attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We generate selection-adjusted NPV and IRR estimates for a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. which account for time-to-graduation, debt financing and tuition levels. We find that a college degree is generally worthwhile, but the private value of the investment is a declining function of time-to-graduation. Selection-adjustments show that for students at the lower end of the ability distribution and in some areas of study, a college degree may never be a good financial proposition; as such, we provide breakeven thresholds for tuition at which college remains viable. Debt financing generates higher returns but greater risk compared to self-financing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose the use of methods based on the Shapley value to assess the fact that private returns to lower levels of educational attainment should be credited with part of the returns from higher attainment levels, since achieving primary education is a necessary condition to enter secondary and tertiary educational levels. We apply the proposed adjustment to a global dataset of private returns to different educational attainment levels and find that the corrected returns to education imply a large shift of returns from tertiary to primary schooling in countries at all income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]