School Choice and Earnings: A Case of Indonesia

Public schools in Indonesia are widely perceived have better inputs and to be superior to private schools. Public schools also benefit advantages of high-scoring peer effect as entry to some junior secondary public schools in urban area is based on national score test in elementary school. In this paper, I attempt to confirm the perception of superiority of public school in Indonesia by comparing the yearly earnings of four types of schools group; Public, Private Secular, Private Islam, and Private Christian. I use a large-scale longitudinal observation of individual and household level on socioeconomic and health survey, Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2000 to estimate the effectiveness junior secondary education in Indonesia. To correct for sample selection bias, I use the two-step method proposed by Bourguignon et al. As a result of insignificant all selectivity bias coefficients, I use the OLS estimation to calculate the earnings decompositions. The insignificant selection bias coefficients suggest that the OLS estimation is unbiased. I use the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition with Reimers’ decomposition technique to estimate earning differential between public and three types of private school graduates. The results of earnings decomposition from OLS estimation, suggest that earning of people who graduate from public school are 25 per cent and 35.2 per cent higher than their counterparts from private nonreligious and private Islam. On the other hand, student who schooled at private Christian school enjoys 0.28 per cents higher earnings that public.