Students who attend smaller schools earn more as adults. As reported in the fall 2004 issue of Education Next, white, male high school graduates who attended schools with 100 or fewer students seem to have learned more so that, later in life, their wages, on average, were 3.7 percent higher than those in bigger schools.
These findings, as reported by University of Chicago political scientist Christopher Berry, are based on wage information from one million workers, as contained in the 1980 U. S. Census. Berry tracked the schooling experience of these workers during the period between 1920 and 1950, then used advanced econometric techniques to estimate the impact of the size of the school they attended on their wages in 1980, the last year for which detailed wage information is currently available.
Despite the fact that smaller schools appear to be more effective, schools have become much larger over the past century, Berry says. During the 1950s, education progressives such as Harvard University president James Conant insisted that "the elimination of the small high school through district reorganization and consolidation should have top priority." Many states asked schools to consolidate and build new, larger schools. As a result, schools increased in size from an average of 87 students in 1929 to an average of 440 students in 1969, a nearly fivefold increase.
Today, some school reformers are calling for smaller schools. Proponents of small schools include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and some large city school systems, such as New York City, Chicago, and San Diego.
Although Barry's findings do not provide direct evidence on the merits of these foundation proposals, Barry does provide strong evidence that the long-standing trend toward larger schools was counterproductive.
Berry, an assistant professor at the Harris School for Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, conducted this research while a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance.
"School Inflation" can be read in its entirety in the fall issue of Education Next online at www.educationnext.org.
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution, committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. The editors of Education Next are Paul E. Peterson, Professor of Government, Harvard University and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Chester E. Finn Jr., President, Fordham Foundation and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Marci Kanstoroom, education consultant; Frederick M. Hess, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; and Martin West, Research Associate, Harvard University.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs, with an internationally renowned archive.
