Les résultats éducatifs de long terme des élèves de l'école secondaire privée au Québec : une évaluation des effets de traitement avec données longitudinales
David Lapierre, Pierre Lefebvre et Philip Merrigan
Very few studies analyze the long term educational effects of private secondary school students while controlling for their socioeconomic status. In Quebec, the second most populous Canadian province, twenty percent of students at this level are enrolled in private schools subsidized by the government, who however set a relatively low ceiling for the fees in exchange for subsidies. Bias from selection, causality and admission coming from the fact that private schools may select their students, give way to inappropriate simplistic comparison of their educational results with their public sector peers. This study uses the first four longitudinal waves on the two cohorts of Statistics Canada's Youth in Transition Survey (YITS). The analysis estimates the average treatment on the treated the effect of private school on secondary school graduation rate within expected number of years (5), enrollment in postsecondary institutions at age 19, university enrollment at age 21 or more, university graduation at age 24 or more, and enrollment in professional degrees program. The econometric analysis of treatment effects is based on a particular entropy balancing algorithm with a large set of key balancing covariates. Results are validated by a simulation-based sensitivity analysis for matching estimators. We find large, positive and statistically significant effects of private schooling on almost all outcomes analyzed. The results are not sensitive to simulations of omitted variable bias.