Report
A second chance at education for early school leavers
C Polidano, D Tabasso, Y-P Tseng
Education Economics | Published : 2013
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to better understand the factors that affect the chances of re-engaging early school leavers in education, with a particular focus on the importance of time out from school (duration dependence) and school-related factors. Using data from three cohorts of the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth and duration models that control for unobserved heterogeneity, our results suggest that programmes that encourage an early return to study and those that develop post-school career plans may be more effective than programmes that concentrate on improving numeracy and literacy scores. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.
Grants
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors assume jointly first authorship of the paper. This research was funded in part by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) under the Social Policy Research Services Agreement (2005-2012) with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent those of the Melbourne Institute or DEEWR. The authors would like to thank Moshe Justman, John Haisken-DeNew and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, NCVER and the Australian Data Archive for making the data available and David Black and Rezida Zakirova for help preparing the data.