A Welfare Analysis of School Choice Reforms in Ghana

Kehinde F. Ajayi, University of California, Berkeley

School choice programs may reinforce educational inequalities if high income students are more likely to take advantage of opportunities to attend selective schools. Using data from Ghana's secondary school admissions system, I examine the welfare impact of a policy which was designed to encourage less-privileged students to have greater access to high quality schools. Overall, higher performing students experienced the largest welfare losses and average-performing students were more likely to have benefited from the policy. Additionally, the policy lead to decreases in student sorting by test scores but had limited impact on socio-economic stratification. The positive impact of the reform implies that gaps between higher and lower performing students may be due in part to an absence of information on school selectivity and guidelines on how to choose an effective application strategy. Altogether, these effects indicate a redistribution of welfare within the educational market.