The effects of the 1997 Ontario Secondary School Reform on human capital accumulation, the youth labour market, and academic grading policies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I study the effects of the abolition of Grade 13, following the 1997 Ontario Secondary School Reform, focusing on three different areas: students' human capital accumulation, the youth labour market, and academic grading policies. In Chapter 1, I investigate the impact of an extra year of schooling on students who will attend university, using the abolition of Grade 13 as an instrument. I construct a flexible factor model allowing for identification and consistent estimation of the return to Grade 13. For these high-ability students, I find that the return to schooling is smaller in magnitude than estimates from the previous literature, providing clear evidence that there is substantial heterogeneity in the return to an additional year of high school, in the direction suggested by the literature on discount rate bias. Chapter 2 looks at the effect of increased competition in university classrooms on students' performance, following the abolition of Grade 13. The abolition of Grade 13 created a double cohort of high school graduates, drastically increasing the number of university applicants in 2003. Given the limited number of places available in universities, the quality of accepted students was significantly higher in that year than in previous years, increasing competition in the classroom. Comparing university grades from 2001 and 2003, I find that, after controlling for ability, students were awarded lower grades in 2003, and that the effect is stronger for lower-ability students. Overall, results indicate that the link between academic ability and GPA was significantly distorted by the increased competition. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine the way that the youth labour market absorbed the large number of new high school graduates arising from the double cohort year. I quantify the effect of the sudden supply shock on inexperienced workers using triple-difference estimation and multiple control groups. Results suggest that the double cohort had a large adverse effect on hourly earnings of inexperienced high-school graduates regardless of the control group, though some caution must be used in interpreting the results as the estimates are fairly imprecise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".