Transition to higher education examination outcomes: Does high school matter?

Abstract

This paper estimates the impact of school quality on the transition to higher education examination (abbreviated as YGS in Turkey) outcomes by controlling for the student quality. Either the class size or the teacher-pupil ratio in main branches is used as a proxy for the quality of schools. Due to data limitations we concentrate on the Anatolian High Schools (AHS) in Istanbul. This choice gives us the opportunity to control for the student quality by making use of the minimum OKS score required for admission to each AHS. Using YGS scores for 2010&2011 and OKS scores for 2006&2007 corresponding to the same cohort, we find that student quality explains the transition to higher education examination outcomes to a large extent. Holding student quality constant however, we find no evidence that class size or the teacher-pupil ratio affects average YGS score of AHS. This can be explained by the relatively standardized school resources devoted to AHS. The results are robust to different scorings of YGS and to the inclusion of clustering.