Behavioral barriers to education.

• Author: Oreopoulos, Philip
• Position: Research Summaries

Research in the economics of education has devoted much attention to the role of external factors, such as teacher quality, class size, curriculum, peers, financial constraints, and parental investments in determining students' development. Students' own role in their development has received comparatively less attention. This is perhaps due to the assumption from the traditional human capital model that students always do the best they can when making decisions about how much to study or how hard to work. In this investment framework, students carefully weigh immediate costs against long-term uncertain benefits to maximize lifetime well-being.

Clearly this process does not adequately describe the behavior of a six-year-old, who must be delicately persuaded to go to school, practice violin, or try addition. An elementary-school student's brain is simply not yet sufficiently developed to execute plans for the future. But over time and with experience, a remarkable neural circuitry expansion and pruning process occurs that makes it possible to hold information in mind before deciding what to do with it. With age, children gradually come to think about the future more. Impulses, feelings, and distractions can be held in check before making a choice. This process can take 25 years to mature, though our tendency to focus on the present or what's salient never fully disappears.

The emerging field of behavioral economics attempts to integrate these tendencies and others identified by research from psychology and sociology in order to better understand individual decision making and consider economic implications. While classical economics often assumes that individuals always make correct short- and long-run trade-offs (ex ante), behavioral economics does not. The field often explores consequences of myopia or lack of salience for decisions related to savings, finance, and health. Education represents a relatively new application of the field, one that seems particularly promising. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a group more challenged by short- and long-term trade-offs than children facing school-related decisions.

In a series of research studies, my coauthors and I have explored this topic using a range of methodologies. This research summary briefly describes our work and points to future possibilities. A more detailed introduction to the topic of behavioral barriers to education is provided in a review article I cowrote with Adam Lavecchia and Heidi Liu last year. (1)

Compulsory Schooling

Compulsory schooling policies that place constraints on when students may start or finish school are not easily justified from a human capital investment model in the absence of positive externalities. Instead they are usually motivated by the belief that children are too short-sighted.

Consider the attitude of former British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking in 2003 on why he favored raising the schoolleaving age to 18: "Think about it: with your children, would you dream of just leaving them to their own devices, not getting a job, not training, nothing? No--you'd nag and push and guide and do anything to get them on their way... and so must we."

Many studies have used legal constraints as instrumental variables to estimate returns to schooling. Some, though not all, find substantial improvements to annual income, health, and other measures of socioeconomic success. (2) I have argued that even a 7 percent expected increase in lifetime wealth from an extra year of school would be hard to turn down under the human capital investment model. Present bias, combined with a...