Proceedings of the 3rd Economics & Finance Conference, Rome

WHO WILL BE OUR FUTURE TEACHERS? EVIDENCE FROM A MULTINOMIAL CHOICE MODEL.

MIKE SMET

Abstract:

In recent years, concerns have risen regarding the teacher labor market in Flanders: there is a sense of fear of decreasing quality of inflowing students in teacher education programs. In this paper we investigate the transition from secondary school to higher education in Flanders, more specifically to teacher education programs. These analyses allow to determine characteristics of the inflow of students into teacher education programs in higher education. We used merged administrative databases from the Flemish Department of Education in order to construct a longitudinal dataset, enabling to track individual students from secondary to higher education. We obtained data from the entire population of secondary school leavers in the academic year 2004-2005 (n=51.902). These data allow tracking individual students during their higher education career from the academic year 2005-2006 until 2011-2012. The data include individual demographic student characteristics, detailed individual enrolment information in secondary education and higher education and a number of secondary school characteristics. In addition we can also add regional characteristics to schools and municipalities. Since pupils are nested in schools and in municipalities multilevel estimation techniques were used to model the transition from secondary education to various potential higher education programs. Both random intercepts and random slopes models were estimated. Our findings show that the odds of enrolment in teacher education programs are highly influenced by several individual, secondary school and regional characteristics. While the differences with academic bachelors have been found to be more pronounced when considering most of the determinants, the inflow in teacher education was also found to be substantially different from the inflow in other professional programs. However, not all variance that is detected at the level of secondary schools can be explained by secondary school characteristics.

Keywords: Transition from secondary to higher education, teacher education, multinomial logistic regression, multilevel

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