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Original Articles

Where they go, what they do and why it matters: the importance of geographic accessibility and social class for decisions relating to higher education institution type, degree level and field of study

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Pages 2952-2965
Published online: 09 May 2014
 

This article considers the impact of geographic accessibility and social class on school leavers when making decisions relating to higher education institution (HEI) type, degree level and field of study. Using a novel and comprehensive Irish data set, we consider a number of joint decisions facing school leavers in relation to where and what to study and employ a range of bivariate choice models which allows us to control for correlations in these decisions. We find that geographic accessibility and social class play an important role in determining outcomes relating to HEI type, degree level and field of study. We argue that these decisions are important in terms of future labour market and other outcomes for school leavers and that current policy in Ireland does not go far enough in mitigating the impact of distance and socio-economic barriers on these outcomes.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants at the Irish Economic Association Annual Conference in Maynooth in May 2013 for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. We thank Dorothy Watson and Selina McCoy from the ESRI for facilitating our access to the SLS data. Finally, we thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments which have improved this article. The usual disclaimer applies.