IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/iza/izawol/journl2022n247.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is there an optimal school starting age?

Author

Listed:
  • Elizabeth Dhuey

    (University of Toronto, Canada, and IZA, Germany)

  • Kourtney Koebel

    (University of Toronto, Canada)

Abstract

There is a widely held belief that older students, by virtue of being more mature and readier to learn at school entry, may have better academic, employment, and earnings outcomes compared to their younger counterparts. There are understated, albeit important, costs to starting school later, however. Compulsory school-attendance laws may allow these same older pupils to drop out of high school earlier, which could adversely impact their employment; entering the workforce later also has implications for lifetime earnings and remittances to governments. Overall, research suggests that school-age entry policies can improve student achievement in the short term, but the long-term impacts are currently not well-understood.

Suggested Citation

  • Elizabeth Dhuey & Kourtney Koebel, 2022. "Is there an optimal school starting age?," IZA World of Labor, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), pages 247-247, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:2022:n:247
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/247/pdfs/age-at-school-entry-how-old-is-old-enough.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://wol.iza.org/articles/age-at-school-entry-how-old-is-old-enough
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    education; age; relative age; test score gap; redshirting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:2022:n:247. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.