Increasing the admission rate to upper secondary school: the case of lower secondary school student career guidance

Although several studies investigate the effects of school resources on student performance, these studies tend to focus more on intervention effect sizes than on their cost-effectiveness. Exploiting policy-induced variation in Denmark and using high-quality administrative data, we investigate the effects of a school intervention that introduces structured student career guidance in lower secondary school on upper secondary school admission. Disregarding the sunk-cost of implementation, the reform was cost-neutral. In a difference-in-difference framework we find that the reform increases admission to upper secondary school between 4.0-6.3 percentage points for immigrants, but shows at best small improvements for the native students.