Effect on Entry into Higher Education

D. Effect on Entry into Higher Education

The School Leavers Survey SLS consists of a questionnaire sent to all secondary schools where they are asked to provide information on the secondary qualifications obtained by school leavers GCSEs, A-levels and also on the postsecondary desti- nation of these students higher education, employment, unemployment, training, unknown. By construction, the information on destinations is more speculative and less precise than the information on qualifications obtained before leaving school. 29 As mentioned in the guidance notes of the SLS, schools often have difficulties in coding the destinations of students who change residence or students who start to work during the summer after leaving school, but who may nonetheless enter into university at the beginning of the next academic year. With all these data limitations in mind, for each area and each cohort, we have constructed a measure of the number of students who have attended higher education after secondary school 30 and we have analyzed this destination outcome using exactly the same methods as those used previously to analyze secondary qualifications. As shown in Table 4, all three strategies suggest a positive effect of the reform on university attendance, even though the effect is less well estimated than the effect on qualifications. For example, Model 3 shows that the increase in university attendance is stronger in areas where the increase in grammar school attendance is greater, suggesting that a 10 percent difference across areas in the increase in grammar school attendance between periods 1977–78 and 1979–80 generates a 5 percent difference across areas in the increase in university attendance between the same period 0.53 elasticity significant at the 1 percent level. Although one might be concerned in principle that a big increase in the demand for university places might have led to constraints on the ability of the higher education system to absorb the new applicants, this does not apply in Northern Ireland. Students can apply to go to university in any part of the United Kingdom as well as Northern Ireland and thus there are many options. In a country the size of the United Kingdom, an increase in the supply of applicants of this magnitude is very unlikely to have caused difficulties.

VI. Interpretation and Discussion