Boston [US]: Children who start preschool at the age of four are considerably more likely to attend college, according to an empirical study headed by an MIT economist.
The research looks at children who attended public preschools in Boston between 1997 and 2003. It discovered that attendance at a public preschool increased "on-time" college enrollment -- starting straight after high school -- by 8.3 percentage points, an 18 per cent gain, among students from similar backgrounds. In addition, there was a 5.4 percentage point rise in college attendance at any time.
"We find that 4-year-olds who were randomly allocated a seat in a public Boston preschool during this time period, 1997 to 2003, are more likely to attend college and that it's a pretty large effect," says Parag Pathak, a professor at MIT's Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study's results. "They're also more likely to graduate from high school, and they're more likely to take the SAT."
The study does not find a connection between preschool attendance and higher student scores on Massachusetts' standardized tests. But it does find that children who attended preschool had fewer behavioural issues later on, including fewer suspensions, less absenteeism, and fewer legal-system problems.
"There are many things that influence whether you go to college, and these behavioural outcomes are relevant to that," says Pathak, who is also a director of Blueprint Labs. This MIT research centre uses advanced empirical methods to examine issues in education, health care, and the workforce.
The paper, "The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston," is published in the February issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Guthrie Gray-Lobe, a research associate at the Becker-Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago and a research affiliate at MIT's Blueprint Labs; Pathak, who is the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT; and Christopher Walters PhD '13, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Publicly funded preschool programs have become increasingly popular and prevalent in recent decades. Across the U.S., 44 states operated publicly funded preschool programs as of 2019, along with 24 of the 40 biggest U.S. cities. The portion of 4-year-olds in the U.S. in a public preschool program has grown from 14 per cent in 2002 to 34 per cent in 2019.
To conduct the study, the researchers followed the academic trajectories of over 4,000 students, in seven cohorts from 1997 to 2003, who took part in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted to place students into a limited number of available preschool slots.
The use of the lottery makes the study rigorous: It creates a natural experiment, allowing the researchers to track the educational outcomes of two groups of students from otherwise similar backgrounds in the same school system. In this case, one group attended preschool, while the other did not.
That approach has rarely been applied to studies of preschool programs.
"The [method] of this work is to take advantage of the elaborate rationing in big-city school districts' choice processes. We've developed techniques to find the right treatment and control comparisons in data produced by these systems," Pathak says.
The study also found a 5.9 percentage point jump in attendance at four-year colleges for students who had attended preschool. Preschool-educated students also were 8.5 percentage points more likely to take the SAT.
"It's fairly rare to find school-based interventions that have effects of this magnitude," says Pathak, who won the 2018 John Bates Clark medal, awarded annually by the American Economic Association to the best economist under age 40 in the U.S.
But while the study does find that preschool increases SAT scores, there was no discernible change on the MCAS, the standardized tests Massachusetts students take in multiple fields in elementary school, middle school, and high school.
That stands in contrast to the larger link in education between higher test scores and college attendance.
"It's not the case that we have an increase in test scores and it corresponds with an increase in college-going," Pathak says. "That's very intriguing." At the same time, he adds, "I don't think the takeaway here is we shouldn't have people take tests."
Indeed, the study's findings suggest that preschool may have a long-term beneficial effect that is not strictly. (ANI)
