CEP Education and Skills Seminars
Breaking the Barriers to Higher Education: The Long-Term Benefits of a Boarding School for Disadvantaged Students.
Marc Gurgand (Paris School of Economics), joint with Luc Behaghel and Clément de Chaisemartin
Tuesday 28 January 2025 16:00 - 17:00
SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH
About this event
France ranks among the OECD countries with the lowest levels of intergenerational social mobility. To address this issue, the “Boarding School of Excellence” initiative aims to provide adolescents from low socio-economic backgrounds with a supportive boarding school environment and improved learning conditions. This paper presents the long-run results of a randomized controlled trial measuring the effects of one such boarding school. We show that it divides by two the proportion of high-school dropouts, and increases by 60% the proportion of higher-education graduates. These large effects, obtained on adolescents, are comparable to those of celebrated preschool interventions. Effects are even higher among students who do not only speak French at home, referred to as minorities. The boarding school has large short-run effects on minorities’ cognitive and socio-emotional scores. A decomposition shows that both effects predict minorities’ large long-term effects
Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.
Directions
This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.
The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.Education and Skills Seminars are part of the CEP's Education and Skills programme.