Alexandre Afonso

Alexandre Afonso

Leiden University

Tag: Education

  • Why School Choice is Bad for Social Mobility

    I am quite a good example of  social mobility. My parents only completed obligatory school – that was four years in rural Portugal in the 1950s – and started working at 12. They moved to France and then Switzerland in the 1970s, and worked their whole lives in unskilled jobs. In spite of that, I Read.

  • Do good universities teach better, or do they just select better students?

    Research commissioned by the  Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (and reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement) argues that the wage premium associated with studying at a Russell Group university is not statistically significant if you control for the social background of students and their A-levels. Graduates of Russell Group universities do earn 36% Read.

  • Why is Portugal lagging behind all other European countries in educational attainment?

    I don’t have the answer. I have just been playing with Barro and Lee’s dataset on education attainment. As the name indicates, it covers education attainment in 146 countries between 1950 and 2010 for different age groups. The two charts above show the average years of schooling of the population 25 and over since 1950 Read.