Breaking the Barriers to Higher Education: The Long-Term Benefits of a Boarding School for Disadvantaged Students

Abstract

France ranks among the OECD countries with the lowest levels of intergenerational social mobility. To address this issue, the "Boarding School of Excellence" initiative aims to provide adolescents from low socioeconomic backgrounds with a supportive boarding school environment and improved learning conditions. This paper presents the long-run results of a randomized controlled trial measuring the effects of one such boarding school. We show that it divides by two the proportion of high-school dropouts, and increases by 60% the proportion of higher-education graduates. These large effects, obtained on adolescents, are comparable to those of celebrated preschool interventions. Effects are even higher among students who do not only speak French at home, referred to as minorities. The boarding school has large short-run effects on minorities' cognitive and socio-emotional scores. A decomposition shows that both effects predict minorities' large long-term effects.