How high school shapes future success

A study led by a recent Harvard graduate analyzed Massachusetts education and unemployment data for insights on how high schools affect students’ long-term educational and earning outcomes. It found that on average, schools that help students succeed in the long run are those that raise their 10th-grade test scores and boost their college plans the most.  

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Preeya Mbekeani, Ed.D. ’20, discussed lessons for parents, educators, and policymakers in the findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Why do we know so little about the impact of high schools on students’ longer-term educational and labor market outcomes?

There are two reasons. The first is, in part, logistical, because the data systems that track students’ educational outcomes over time were only established in the United States in the early 2000s. States began collecting annual data on students and their performance on standardized tests in a systematic way since then. Over time, they were able, through these data systems, to bring together data from higher education institutions, and even more recently, as Massachusetts has done, they’ve connected the student data to information on labor market earnings from the unemployment insurance agency in the state. Even 10 or 15 years ago, we just didn’t have the data infrastructure to do a study like this. The other reason is that the cohorts we study entered high school about 20 years ago, so we’re looking at students right around the time that these data systems were first established. We needed that longtime horizon because earnings for students can be quite variable in their first years in the labor market, and we wanted to be able to capture their individual earnings as adults in their early 30s.

Talk about your study sample and methodology.

We had a total of about 285,000 students in our study. We used student-level data on five cohorts of high school students in Massachusetts public high schools. The first cohort are students who entered high school in the 2002-2003 school year, and the last cohort entered in the 2006-2007 school year. This work was done as part of a long-standing partnership between researchers affiliated at Brown and Harvard and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to analyze students’ progress through the Massachusetts education system and into the workforce.

We estimated what are called school value-added models, which are intended to estimate the causal impact of schools on student outcomes. The way this methodology is designed is that rather than looking at average test score levels of students, we’re trying to isolate what it is that schools have contributed to students’ test scores or the other outcomes.

The study found that high schools can affect students’ college enrollment and completion as well as their future earnings. How so?

We measured schools’ impacts on students for college-going and completion and earnings using value-added models. This produced schools’ estimated impact on each of these outcomes, so that we could compare lower- and higher-performing schools. You can think about lining them up in order of their impacts, with high-performing schools at the 80th percentile of the distribution and low-performing schools at the 20th percentile.

Based on our analysis, we find that students who are attending high-performing high schools are 11 percent more likely to enroll in college and they are 31 percent more likely to graduate from a four-year college compared to those attending low-performing high schools. We also see big differences in earnings across high schools. Students attending those high-performing schools, which are very effective at raising earnings, earn about 25 percent more, or over $10,000 more in 2024 dollars, at age 30, than students in the low-performing high schools.

This finding is important because it’s one thing to know that schools vary in the longer-run outcomes they produce for students, but for practitioners and people who work in schools, they want to understand how to produce these impacts. For a long time, education has relied on test scores to measure high schools, but we wanted to look at other measures as well. Through student surveys, Massachusetts has collected information on students’ college plans. Students in the cohorts we studied were asked this question in eighth grade and in 10th grade, so we can see how going to the high school they attend impacts their plans for college. We found that schools that are effective in raising 10th-grade test scores are also effective at increasing students’ aspirations for college. There’s also a positive correlation with their effects on the longer-run outcomes of getting students to complete college and having higher earnings.

Can you explain what your study found on the impacts of high schools on low-income students’ college completion and earnings?

A lot of our interest in this topic began because we wanted to see how schools can increase students’ educational and economic outcomes and contribute to their socioeconomic mobility. We know that for students who grow up in low-income households, or in poverty, schools can be very important for their later life outcomes. In this study in particular, we found that schools that that are effective at improving outcomes for low-income students are also effective for high-income students. We found that schools that produce the highest value-add by promoting both positive college completion outcomes and earning outcomes are schools where more of the students are from high-income families, but we also see that among schools that serve larger percentages of low-income students there are very effective high schools.

What are your study’s contributions to the literature?

Our paper makes two key contributions to understanding high schools’ impacts on student outcomes. Our paper is the first to look at outcomes that are long-run, far into students’ future, for a broad set of high schools. Other papers have looked at impacts on college enrollment, but ours is the first to look at four-year college completion, and at labor market earnings. We also document how much variation there is across high schools in these long-term outcomes. The second contribution is to connect what schools are doing while students are in high school and how those shorter-run measures predict or don’t predict the schools’ impacts on longer-term outcomes. That’s where we think the research can be useful and informative for practitioners and policymakers to understand; what is it the schools are doing now and how does that relate to future outcomes for students?

The study found that schools that improve 10th-grade test scores more have larger effects on both four-year college graduation and earnings, but testing remains controversial.

Yes, testing is controversial. What’s particularly controversial about testing is not the tests themselves, but how the tests get used for accountability for students, teachers, and schools. We don’t really speak to that kind of accountability, but our work shows that test scores are an important measure to understand schools’ effects, both in the shorter term and the longer term. We find that schools that raise student test scores more than expected are also those that are more effective in improving longer-run educational and earnings outcomes. That being said, our work shows that tests are an important measure, but they are not the only one.

What policies and initiatives would help high schools make a positive difference in the life outcomes of students?

Our work shows that we should think more broadly about the measures we use to assess school effectiveness. Test scores are an important measure, but they don’t tell the whole story. And while we have been using these standardized test scores for a long time in education, our work and others’ work have shown that other measures related to social and emotional outcomes and college aspirations can also tell us critical information around how schools affect students in the long run. Educators, parents, and policymakers on some level know this already. As parents, we want schools to do more for students, beyond just raising their test scores; we want schools to make them stronger citizens, caring neighbors, and so on. I think our study provides some evidence to suggest that there are other things that we can measure that can tell us about what schools are doing for students, and how that relates to long-term outcomes.