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Can State Language Policies Distort Students' Demand for Higher Education?

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Author Info

  • Alexander Muravyev

    () (Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA))

  • Oleksandr Talavera

    () (School of Economics, University of East Anglia)

Abstract

This paper takes advantage of a recent policy experiment in Ukraine's secondary education system to study the effect of stricter requirements for proficiency in the state language on linguistic minority students' demand for, as well as opportunities to pursue, further studies at the university level. The reform that we consider obligated all minority students, including those studying in public schools with a full cycle of education in minority languages, to take a standardized school exit test (which is also a university entry test) in Ukrainian, the state language, thus denying them previously granted access to translated tests. Using school-level data and employing the difference-in-difference estimator we find evidence that the reform resulted in a decline in the number of subjects taken by minority students at the school exit test. There was also a notable shift in the take-up of particular subjects, with fewer exams taken by minority students in more linguistically-demanding subjects such as History, Biology, and Geography, and more exams taken in foreign languages and Math. Overall, our results suggest some distortions in the accumulation of human capital by linguistic minority students induced by the language policy.

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Paper provided by School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. in its series University of East Anglia AEP Discussion Papers in Economics with number 2010_23.

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Date of creation: 29 Dec 2010
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Handle: RePEc:uea:aepppr:2010_23

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Keywords: language policy; economics of minorities; education; Ukraine;

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References

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  1. Dustmann, Christian & Fabbri, Francesca, 2000. "Language Proficiency and Labour Market Performance of Immigrants in the UK," IZA Discussion Papers 156, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
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Cited by:
  1. Coupe, Tom & Olefir, Anna & Alonso, Juan Diego, 2011. "Is optimization an opportunity ? an assessment of the impact of class size and school size on the performance of Ukrainian secondary schools," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5879, The World Bank.

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