Education & Research
Mind the Gap: Measuring Academic Underachievement Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis
In this paper we propose using Stochastic Frontier Analysis to estimate pupils’ academic underachievement. We model underachievement as the gap between expected achievement and actual achievement, not due to a learning disability. Our data are a panel for 2,228 Belgian pupils observed over six years of primary education. We find that the average underachievement gap is 23.5%. That is, the average pupil does not exploit about one fourth of her potential. Gifted pupils appear to underachieve as much as non-gifted pupils. We also find that class size is a determinant of underachievement. The association between class size and underachievement is non-monotonic; with an underachievement minimum at a class size of about 20 pupils.
Language distance to English impedes research performance
Today, scientific knowledge is predominantly disseminated in English. This paper shows that global universities’ research performance, as measured by publications in top journals, declines as the differences between their local language and English increase. This effect is robust to controls for university factors like proportion of international staff and faculty-to-student ratio, as well as country-level factors like economic development, youth academic achievement, university degree rate, politics, culture, trade with and geographic distance to English speaking countries, among others. This quantification of the research performance penalties induced by linguistic distance from the lingua franca may inform policy makers who must balance trade-offs between embracing English against cultural and local labor market pressures to orient around the local language.
Language as a Strategic Choice — Drawing Global Research Talent by Switching to English
Global universities are switching their language of instruction to English to strengthen international rankings and research power. This paper quantifies the benefits of switching to English on university research performance and faculty recruiting. Using the two-way fixed effects (TWFE) estimator and the staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator, this paper shows that introducing English as the official language of instruction in a degree program increases the academic ability of new international faculty hires in Dutch and Belgian universities by a 7-21% average journal impact factor (JIF). These results are robust to a battery of controls including university and time fixed effects as well as university specific time trends. We argue that switching to English reduces labour mobility barriers, allowing universities in non-English speaking countries to recruit from the global talent pool. It removes language hurdles to scientific communication, which potentially accelerates knowledge diffusion and increases research power.
The (Un)Level Playing Field: How Color-Blind Educational Tracking Leads to Unequal Access
Educational tracking seeks to group students by unobserved ability using measures of observable acquired skills. In a model where individuals have differential skills prior to beginning formal education due to differences in early childhood development (e.g. linguistic, cultural, or nutritional disadvantages), in this paper we show that color-blind tracking systematically underplaces minorities. As a result, minorities have, in expectation, higher abilities than non-minorities assigned to the same track -- regardless of track. A counterintuitive empirical implication of the model is that, conditional on tracking score and track, minorities will outperform non-minorities in subsequent testing following tracking. Affirmative action policies seeking to equalize post-tracking outcomes share similar flaws to color-blind standards in that the average ability of minorities assigned to the upper track remains higher than for non-minorities.