Follow the Leader: Student Strikes, School Absenteeism and Long Term Implications for Education Outcomes

The 2011 Chilean student strikes, led by university students, but promptly joined by hundreds of thousands of secondary school students, triggered a major drop in public secondary school attendance during that year: a decline... [ view full abstract ]

The 2011 Chilean student strikes, led by university students, but promptly joined by hundreds of thousands of secondary school students, triggered a major drop in public secondary school attendance during that year: a decline of nearly 20% in all four grades. Attendance returned to normal levels in 2012. I show that, for public secondary school students, the strikes led to a persistent negative effect on the high-stakes math exam taken after completing secondary education and university enrollment, even four years after the strikes. The effect in the math exam fluctuates between 3.2% and 4% standard deviation (sd.). Associated university enrollment rates fell between 9.8% to 15.3%. I find no significant effect on the high-stakes language exam. These results are neither driven by sorting of students across schools or cohorts, nor by other factors such as disruptiveness at the time of the exams, school environment, class size or teachers. Finally, using the school type attended during the strikes as an instrument for school attendance, IV estimations suggest that 10 percentage point (pp.) decrease in attendance during secondary school is related to 9.5% sd. reduction in the math exam, and a 3.2 pp. reduction in the associated probability of university enrollment.