- Email: [email protected]
Introduction to the special issue in memory of Jean-Claude Eicher: The Second Dijon Conference
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647 www.elsevier.com/locate/econedurev
Editorial
Introduction to the special issue in memory of Jean-Claude Eicher: The Second Dijon Conference When they met in Dijon (France) in 1986, economists of education were invited to ‘‘tackle the new policy issues’’. This event was a great opportunity to gather some of the most prominent researchers in the field, and to have them present and discuss the outcome of their work.1 How different is the scene exactly 20 years later? One way to answer this question was to convene again the international community of economists involved in education issues.2 This is how the idea of a new conference in the same University was born. Coupled with that, was a chance to honor the memory of Jean-Claude Eicher, the founder of the Institut de Recherche sur l’Economie de l’Education (IREDU), one of the top research centers for the economics of education. In response to a widely disseminated call for papers, over 150 abstracts were submitted and were screened by members of the Conference Scientific Committee3 and external reviewers,4 to whom I am immensely grateful. From this pool, some 50 papers and 40 posters were carefully selected. The papers and posters selected for the conference are authored by scholars from more than 1 A selection of the papers presented in the first Dijon Conference can be found in the special 1987 issue of the Economics of Education Review, 6 (2). 2 About 20 ‘‘veterans’’ have attended both events. 3 Martin Carnoy (Stanford University, USA), Elchanan Cohn (University of South Carolina, USA), Emmanuel Jimenez (World Bank), Susanna Loeb (Stanford University, USA), Benoit Millot (World Bank), Weifang Min (Peking University, China), Alejandra Mizala (University of Chile), Richard Murnane (Harvard University, USA), and Jean-Jacques Paul (IREDU, France). 4 Elizabeth King (World Bank), Ge´rard Lassibille (IREDU, France), Louis Levy-Garboua (University of Paris I, France), Jean Luc de Meulemeester (University of Brussels, Belgium), Alain Mingat (IREDU, France), Franc- ois Orivel (IREDU, France), Georges Psacharopoulos (independent consultant), and Jee Peng Tan (World Bank).
0272-7757/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2007.09.003
30 countries spread over all continents, and represent ongoing world-wide research in the field. Browsing through these rich documents provides a unique perspective to observe the evolution of our discipline during the last 20 years. In a nutshell, one can discern both stability and innovation. First, the obvious, the invariants: academic achievement, education and growth, rate of return analysis and external efficiency, were dominant themes in the mid-1980. They remain high in today’s agenda. Two sessions of the 2006 conference were needed to nudge seven papers linked with ‘‘growth and returns’’, and two others had to be designed for the 10 papers dealing with academic performance. One special session was devoted to labor market issues. Then, some themes have emerged forcefully: quality of education, governance, and service delivery, while higher education has risen as a fullfledged area of research. This area and these themes are in perfect sync with what policy makers, educators, students and parents alike are concerned with across the board—and across the globe. Quality is becoming the overwhelming concern, including in those countries which are still struggling with access issues, and are still muddling through to reach the Millennium Development Goals. Indeed, the determinants of learning achievement have been around from the very beginning, but the general thrust from inputs to outputs and finally to outcomes is propelling a new wave of research. The relative failure of rapidly expanding education systems to actually deliver relevant and sustainable skills has prompted policy makers, donors, and (finally?) researchers to look beyond enrollment, and, more recently beyond completion, at what students actually learn. The joint effect of school factors and environmental factors is more blurred, as research shows
ARTICLE IN PRESS 646
Editorial / Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647
how intricate and interrelated the two universes are (including through self-selection). What is new, too, is the (re)discovery by economists that money does not (necessarily) buy you a good education. This may seem trivial, but it is not, if you think of countries which devote up to a third of their national budget to the education sector, and still find themselves at the bottom of international rankings. In developing countries, massification was often reached at the expense of quality, while in OECD countries, not a year goes by without a report lamenting the functional illiteracy of sizeable cohorts of high school graduates. The conundrum has not left economists inactive, and several papers presented at the conference try to disentangle the Gordian knot of identification. Even though not a theme per se in the conference, governance is underlying the search for better quality and it is the crusible in which inputs need to be combined, in order to produce an impact on quality. The way this combination is arranged is at the background of many attempts to see beyond factors of production (infrastructure, teachers, material and equipment). Scores of studies in the 1980 and 1990s have not succeeded to yield robust results regarding which inputs matter most for student success. One missing dimension, as argued long ago,5 is time, and new evidence tends to confirm this. However, time itself can be viewed as one element mainly determined by management. Several papers presented in Dijon tackle the role of organizations, information, contractual arrangements, on the efficiency of service delivery. Twenty years back, higher education was still largely outside of the mainstream of research, and equally outside of the domain of Official Development Assistance (partially imputable to the legacy of a narrow interpretation of rates of returns). Nowadays, both the ubiquitous concept of the knowledge economy and the pressure of new cohorts of secondary school graduates, higher (or tertiary) education has become the most rapidly expanding sub-sector of education systems, and has reached legitimacy as an area of public investment. Ironically, though, as enrollments increase, available public resources per student are dipping, and many higher education systems have the greatest difficulties to migrate from the unsustainable public financing schemes dating from the elite era to 5
Included in the editorial of the 1987 special issue of this Review.
diversified schemes more adapted to mass higher education. Here again, researchers are on duty, as evidenced by the many papers devoted to higher education presented in Dijon. No wonder the role of the private sector, and the whole issue of demandside financing, are high on the list of scholars (and no lower on those of students and policy makers). Both the ‘‘old’’ and the ‘‘new’’ themes benefit from the accumulation of databases (especially students’ performance data) and from a dramatic surge in econometric methodology. The availability of TIMSS, PISA, and other international test score data is providing researchers with a wealth of data, which allows in-depth comparative investigation of the respective impact of school inputs, institutional and parental environment on learning achievement. The more data available, the more compelling the need to get more of them. The frustration about the above-mentioned widespread failure to guarantee quality education has undoubtedly helped realize that without adequate measures of student achievements, little could be done to assess progress. At the same time, econometric methods are more and more sophisticated. One could argue that the very dearth and/or poor quality of data are precisely what triggered this search for better econometric tools (together with the mounting evidence of the multiple levels of intercorrelation amongst multiple factors). The result is that we now have some robust evidence that cognitive skills do matter—and hence their measurement. The lesson is for economists and policy makers alike. A parallel, solid, trend is the emergence of attempts to evaluate the impact of policies. First amongst these are the experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation approaches.6 Let alone the progress they allow in measuring the effect of education policies, the very emergence of the new approaches has also prompted improvement in ‘‘traditional’’ evaluation methods which could not stay idle in front of such a challenge. Another, broader windfall benefit of the new approaches is to instill more securely the discipline of assessment, and in particular, to introduce more systematically the idea of using control groups in doing so. It may still be early to decide which approach is ‘‘better’’. Each stream has its own requirements and its own benefits. Most likely, using a combination of approaches is the best way to come 6 One of their most prominent champions, Esther Duflo (MIT) gave a keynote speech on ‘‘Lessons from Randomized Evaluation’’ in Dijon.
ARTICLE IN PRESS Editorial / Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647
to parts with the intricate issue of identification—and to justify the introduction of new policies. In this issue There is no need for a long introduction of the papers gathered in this special issue. They are the outcome of a final screening of the 50 papers presented in Dijon (using the hindsight of the presentations and discussions).7 As such, they are the quintessence of the June 2006 conference, and neatly echo the trends alluded to above. No less than four teams (Mohammad Asadullah, Nazmul Chaudhury, and Amit Dar on Bangladesh, Naercio Menezes-Filho and Elaine Pazello, for Brazil, Charles T. Clotfelter, Jacob L Vigdor, and Helen F. Ladd for the USA and Hai Auh Dang for Vietnam) make heroic efforts to assess how student achievement is affected by school characteristics (secular vs. religious set-up), teacher salaries, teacher credentials, and private tutorial, respectively. In all of these attempts, laudable econometric care is taken to circumvent selectivity biases and to minimize the effect of intercorrelated unobservable variables. Rich data sets also contribute to the robustness of the results. Three other teams—Henry M. Levin, Clive Belfield, Peter Muennig and Cecilia Rouse (for USA), Fa´bio Waltenberg and Vincent Vandenberghe (Brazil) and Wenli Li (China)—tackle equity issues. While Wenli focuses of the perverse effects of the free fee policy in higher education, the other two teams offer fascinating examples of policy modeling, each estimating the costs of not investing in the education of disadvantaged groups. The team led by Hank estimates the net benefits associated with increased tax revenues, and decreased costs of health and crime. Franc- ois Bourguignon and Halsey Rogers conclude this series on equity by demonstrating that standard static, time-blind distribution incidence analyses may lead to distorted estimates of the progressivity of public spending in education, and to ill-informed policy measures. They make a plea to craft these analyses in an intergenerational framework, and to carefully distinguish costs and benefits of present and future generations.8 7
I used my prerogative as guest editor to insert the Bourguignon and Rogers’ paper—a keynote presentation at the conference—without submitting it to the selection process. 8 For an earlier advice on the same issue, see Bowman (1987).
647
Lionel Page, Louis Levy-Garboua and Claude Montmarquette, on the one hand, and Joop Hartog and Wim Vijverberg, on the other hand, are interested in educational choices and strategies. The first team’s perspective is more on the equity side, while the second’s is on the value of investment in skills. Both papers offer innovative methodologies. The first one uses a purely experimental approach to test how different educational choices are influenced by social differences in aspiration levels. The second borrows a Mean-variance model from the finance paradigm and introduces the risk factor to explore the tradeoffs between specialized and general curricula. Last but not least, Eliot Jamison, Dean Jamison and Eric Hanushek’s paper pushes the frontier of what we know regarding the contribution of education to income growth. Making a judicious use of international student test scores, involving more countries, over a longer time span, and with additional controls, the team convincingly argues that the source of the contribution is not the number of years of schooling but its quality, and its impact on technological progress. En passant, they confirm the positive impact of improved quality education on mortality decline: good news transmitted by highly skilled messengers. Post-scriptum At the time of the 1987 special issue, the EER was still a young journal. Indeed it is now a grown-up adult, a major and well-established communication tool available to the community of researchers. Thus, Elchanan’s invitation to edit a new special issue based on the 2006 Dijon conference is a particularly great honor for which I am profoundly grateful, and to which I wish to associate JeanClaude Eicher’s memory. References Bowman, M. J. (1987). The importance of examining cohort uniqueness in the formulation of human investment policies. Economics of Education Review, 6(2), 67–79.
Benoıˆ t Millot The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW, Washington, DC, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647 www.elsevier.com/locate/econedurev
Editorial
Introduction to the special issue in memory of Jean-Claude Eicher: The Second Dijon Conference When they met in Dijon (France) in 1986, economists of education were invited to ‘‘tackle the new policy issues’’. This event was a great opportunity to gather some of the most prominent researchers in the field, and to have them present and discuss the outcome of their work.1 How different is the scene exactly 20 years later? One way to answer this question was to convene again the international community of economists involved in education issues.2 This is how the idea of a new conference in the same University was born. Coupled with that, was a chance to honor the memory of Jean-Claude Eicher, the founder of the Institut de Recherche sur l’Economie de l’Education (IREDU), one of the top research centers for the economics of education. In response to a widely disseminated call for papers, over 150 abstracts were submitted and were screened by members of the Conference Scientific Committee3 and external reviewers,4 to whom I am immensely grateful. From this pool, some 50 papers and 40 posters were carefully selected. The papers and posters selected for the conference are authored by scholars from more than 1 A selection of the papers presented in the first Dijon Conference can be found in the special 1987 issue of the Economics of Education Review, 6 (2). 2 About 20 ‘‘veterans’’ have attended both events. 3 Martin Carnoy (Stanford University, USA), Elchanan Cohn (University of South Carolina, USA), Emmanuel Jimenez (World Bank), Susanna Loeb (Stanford University, USA), Benoit Millot (World Bank), Weifang Min (Peking University, China), Alejandra Mizala (University of Chile), Richard Murnane (Harvard University, USA), and Jean-Jacques Paul (IREDU, France). 4 Elizabeth King (World Bank), Ge´rard Lassibille (IREDU, France), Louis Levy-Garboua (University of Paris I, France), Jean Luc de Meulemeester (University of Brussels, Belgium), Alain Mingat (IREDU, France), Franc- ois Orivel (IREDU, France), Georges Psacharopoulos (independent consultant), and Jee Peng Tan (World Bank).
0272-7757/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2007.09.003
30 countries spread over all continents, and represent ongoing world-wide research in the field. Browsing through these rich documents provides a unique perspective to observe the evolution of our discipline during the last 20 years. In a nutshell, one can discern both stability and innovation. First, the obvious, the invariants: academic achievement, education and growth, rate of return analysis and external efficiency, were dominant themes in the mid-1980. They remain high in today’s agenda. Two sessions of the 2006 conference were needed to nudge seven papers linked with ‘‘growth and returns’’, and two others had to be designed for the 10 papers dealing with academic performance. One special session was devoted to labor market issues. Then, some themes have emerged forcefully: quality of education, governance, and service delivery, while higher education has risen as a fullfledged area of research. This area and these themes are in perfect sync with what policy makers, educators, students and parents alike are concerned with across the board—and across the globe. Quality is becoming the overwhelming concern, including in those countries which are still struggling with access issues, and are still muddling through to reach the Millennium Development Goals. Indeed, the determinants of learning achievement have been around from the very beginning, but the general thrust from inputs to outputs and finally to outcomes is propelling a new wave of research. The relative failure of rapidly expanding education systems to actually deliver relevant and sustainable skills has prompted policy makers, donors, and (finally?) researchers to look beyond enrollment, and, more recently beyond completion, at what students actually learn. The joint effect of school factors and environmental factors is more blurred, as research shows
ARTICLE IN PRESS 646
Editorial / Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647
how intricate and interrelated the two universes are (including through self-selection). What is new, too, is the (re)discovery by economists that money does not (necessarily) buy you a good education. This may seem trivial, but it is not, if you think of countries which devote up to a third of their national budget to the education sector, and still find themselves at the bottom of international rankings. In developing countries, massification was often reached at the expense of quality, while in OECD countries, not a year goes by without a report lamenting the functional illiteracy of sizeable cohorts of high school graduates. The conundrum has not left economists inactive, and several papers presented at the conference try to disentangle the Gordian knot of identification. Even though not a theme per se in the conference, governance is underlying the search for better quality and it is the crusible in which inputs need to be combined, in order to produce an impact on quality. The way this combination is arranged is at the background of many attempts to see beyond factors of production (infrastructure, teachers, material and equipment). Scores of studies in the 1980 and 1990s have not succeeded to yield robust results regarding which inputs matter most for student success. One missing dimension, as argued long ago,5 is time, and new evidence tends to confirm this. However, time itself can be viewed as one element mainly determined by management. Several papers presented in Dijon tackle the role of organizations, information, contractual arrangements, on the efficiency of service delivery. Twenty years back, higher education was still largely outside of the mainstream of research, and equally outside of the domain of Official Development Assistance (partially imputable to the legacy of a narrow interpretation of rates of returns). Nowadays, both the ubiquitous concept of the knowledge economy and the pressure of new cohorts of secondary school graduates, higher (or tertiary) education has become the most rapidly expanding sub-sector of education systems, and has reached legitimacy as an area of public investment. Ironically, though, as enrollments increase, available public resources per student are dipping, and many higher education systems have the greatest difficulties to migrate from the unsustainable public financing schemes dating from the elite era to 5
Included in the editorial of the 1987 special issue of this Review.
diversified schemes more adapted to mass higher education. Here again, researchers are on duty, as evidenced by the many papers devoted to higher education presented in Dijon. No wonder the role of the private sector, and the whole issue of demandside financing, are high on the list of scholars (and no lower on those of students and policy makers). Both the ‘‘old’’ and the ‘‘new’’ themes benefit from the accumulation of databases (especially students’ performance data) and from a dramatic surge in econometric methodology. The availability of TIMSS, PISA, and other international test score data is providing researchers with a wealth of data, which allows in-depth comparative investigation of the respective impact of school inputs, institutional and parental environment on learning achievement. The more data available, the more compelling the need to get more of them. The frustration about the above-mentioned widespread failure to guarantee quality education has undoubtedly helped realize that without adequate measures of student achievements, little could be done to assess progress. At the same time, econometric methods are more and more sophisticated. One could argue that the very dearth and/or poor quality of data are precisely what triggered this search for better econometric tools (together with the mounting evidence of the multiple levels of intercorrelation amongst multiple factors). The result is that we now have some robust evidence that cognitive skills do matter—and hence their measurement. The lesson is for economists and policy makers alike. A parallel, solid, trend is the emergence of attempts to evaluate the impact of policies. First amongst these are the experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation approaches.6 Let alone the progress they allow in measuring the effect of education policies, the very emergence of the new approaches has also prompted improvement in ‘‘traditional’’ evaluation methods which could not stay idle in front of such a challenge. Another, broader windfall benefit of the new approaches is to instill more securely the discipline of assessment, and in particular, to introduce more systematically the idea of using control groups in doing so. It may still be early to decide which approach is ‘‘better’’. Each stream has its own requirements and its own benefits. Most likely, using a combination of approaches is the best way to come 6 One of their most prominent champions, Esther Duflo (MIT) gave a keynote speech on ‘‘Lessons from Randomized Evaluation’’ in Dijon.
ARTICLE IN PRESS Editorial / Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 645–647
to parts with the intricate issue of identification—and to justify the introduction of new policies. In this issue There is no need for a long introduction of the papers gathered in this special issue. They are the outcome of a final screening of the 50 papers presented in Dijon (using the hindsight of the presentations and discussions).7 As such, they are the quintessence of the June 2006 conference, and neatly echo the trends alluded to above. No less than four teams (Mohammad Asadullah, Nazmul Chaudhury, and Amit Dar on Bangladesh, Naercio Menezes-Filho and Elaine Pazello, for Brazil, Charles T. Clotfelter, Jacob L Vigdor, and Helen F. Ladd for the USA and Hai Auh Dang for Vietnam) make heroic efforts to assess how student achievement is affected by school characteristics (secular vs. religious set-up), teacher salaries, teacher credentials, and private tutorial, respectively. In all of these attempts, laudable econometric care is taken to circumvent selectivity biases and to minimize the effect of intercorrelated unobservable variables. Rich data sets also contribute to the robustness of the results. Three other teams—Henry M. Levin, Clive Belfield, Peter Muennig and Cecilia Rouse (for USA), Fa´bio Waltenberg and Vincent Vandenberghe (Brazil) and Wenli Li (China)—tackle equity issues. While Wenli focuses of the perverse effects of the free fee policy in higher education, the other two teams offer fascinating examples of policy modeling, each estimating the costs of not investing in the education of disadvantaged groups. The team led by Hank estimates the net benefits associated with increased tax revenues, and decreased costs of health and crime. Franc- ois Bourguignon and Halsey Rogers conclude this series on equity by demonstrating that standard static, time-blind distribution incidence analyses may lead to distorted estimates of the progressivity of public spending in education, and to ill-informed policy measures. They make a plea to craft these analyses in an intergenerational framework, and to carefully distinguish costs and benefits of present and future generations.8 7
I used my prerogative as guest editor to insert the Bourguignon and Rogers’ paper—a keynote presentation at the conference—without submitting it to the selection process. 8 For an earlier advice on the same issue, see Bowman (1987).
647
Lionel Page, Louis Levy-Garboua and Claude Montmarquette, on the one hand, and Joop Hartog and Wim Vijverberg, on the other hand, are interested in educational choices and strategies. The first team’s perspective is more on the equity side, while the second’s is on the value of investment in skills. Both papers offer innovative methodologies. The first one uses a purely experimental approach to test how different educational choices are influenced by social differences in aspiration levels. The second borrows a Mean-variance model from the finance paradigm and introduces the risk factor to explore the tradeoffs between specialized and general curricula. Last but not least, Eliot Jamison, Dean Jamison and Eric Hanushek’s paper pushes the frontier of what we know regarding the contribution of education to income growth. Making a judicious use of international student test scores, involving more countries, over a longer time span, and with additional controls, the team convincingly argues that the source of the contribution is not the number of years of schooling but its quality, and its impact on technological progress. En passant, they confirm the positive impact of improved quality education on mortality decline: good news transmitted by highly skilled messengers. Post-scriptum At the time of the 1987 special issue, the EER was still a young journal. Indeed it is now a grown-up adult, a major and well-established communication tool available to the community of researchers. Thus, Elchanan’s invitation to edit a new special issue based on the 2006 Dijon conference is a particularly great honor for which I am profoundly grateful, and to which I wish to associate JeanClaude Eicher’s memory. References Bowman, M. J. (1987). The importance of examining cohort uniqueness in the formulation of human investment policies. Economics of Education Review, 6(2), 67–79.
Benoıˆ t Millot The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW, Washington, DC, USA E-mail address: [email protected]