The Economics of Education: Special Issue Editorial
| Author | Steve Bradley,Jim Taylor |
| Date | 01 May 2004 |
| Published date | 01 May 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0036-9292.2004.00299.x |
EDITORIAL
THE ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION:
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORIAL
Steve Bradley and Jim Taylor
n
Interest in the economics of education has grown rapidly during the past two
decades and continues to do so. Economic research into educational issues
is becoming less and less confined to the small number of specialist journals.
It now permeates the leading general journals in economics and overlaps with
other sub-areas such as labour economics and development economics, thereby
reflecting the growing recognition of the importance of this branch of economic
research. One of the reasons for this increase in research activity is the greater
availability of relevant data, although this is still far from perfect. The other, and
perhaps more fundamental, reason is that policymakers have come to recognise
that the quality of human capital is one of the most important determinants of
individual and national economic prosperity. Moreover, rising expenditure on
education has forced policy makers to consider ‘what works’ in terms of the
policies that they design and implement. The order of the day is therefore
‘evidenced-based’ policy making, and research in the economics of education is
helping to fulfil that need. Our aim in this special issue has been to provide the
general reader with an insight into the kinds of problems that economists are
investigating in the area of education economics.
The first three papers are concerned with the economics of secondary
schooling. In the first paper, Hanushek revisits and extends his earlier work on
the impact of educational resources (i.e. expenditure) on educational attainment.
He begins by pointing to the absence of any consistent relationship between
resources and student performance and argues that simply increasing
expenditure per student without very careful consideration about how the extra
resources are used is unlikely to have the planned effects on educational
outcomes. The main thrust of the Hanushek paper is that an immense amount of
previous research has failed to produce useful policy recommendations. Two
reasons are given. First, a major ‘input’ into the schooling process, namely the
quality of teaching, has not been incorporated into econometric analyses of
student performance. This is a major deficiency in need of serious attention,
especially given the vast amount of resources devoted to education. Second,
statistical modelling of the production process in schools has suffered from being
linear and additive when the real world is much more likely to be non-linear and
multiplicative. For instance, class size and the quality of teaching determine
n
Lancaster University
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 51, No. 2, May 2004
rScottish Economic Society 2004, Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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