Enduring Effects of Schooling — A Neglected Area in Educational Research1

AS an undergraduate in psychol­ ogy some thirty years ago, I served as a participant in many experiments, but the only one I now remember was a study of the retention of Latin vocabu­ lary taught in the Gymnasium. My per­ formance was rather disappointing and so was that of my co-participants, con­ sidering that only a few years had gone by since we had spent four hours a week for four years learning Latin vocabu­ lary, and with a rather good immediate attainment as far as that goes. Everyone can cite similar experiences of how laboriously acquired knowledge is lost, but researchers still do not fully under­ stand the determinants of this phe­ nomenon. We can also cite positive schooling experiences — learning activities we were able to pursue later out of school and where we reached levels that vastly exceeded our performance at the end of formal education. But again we know little about the characteristics of school­ ing that enhance proficiency in life­ long learning. I have chosen this topic not because I have answers to these questions, but because I find it challenging to try to grasp some of the conceptual, meth­ odological, and logistic problems that have hampered empirical study of the long-term effects of education. I shall start with three examples of studies where knowledge among adults has been related to the amount of educa­ tion received. The first example is from a study of adult work skills and knowl­ edge (National Assessment of Educa­ tional Progress, 1976). A national sample of young adults (age 26-35) was tested in 1973-74. The tests meas­ ured job knowledge, both general and specific, and basic skills in four areas: computation and measurement, use of graphic and reference materials, writ­ ten communication, and manual and perceptual skills. The basic skills tested were all of the general type found in the standard curriculum for the eight first grades and required no special or ad­ vanced courses. The frequency of correct answers was strongly related to amount of schooling. The college graduates in general scored 30-40 percentage units higher than those who had left school after ninth grade or earlier. High school graduates were found in between but closer to college graduates than to elementary school leavers. The report is descriptive and does not aim at a causal analysis of differences. It can be estimated that the difference between the extreme categories of schooling would have decreased about 10 units if the comparisons had been made with parents' education under control. But the most important control that one would like to have is not possi­ ble with available data — the control for initial differences in learning capac­ ity between those who decided to finish school as early as possible and those who continued to higher levels of edu­ cation. Another complication affecting these data is the distance in time be­ tween end of formal schooling and test­ ing. The oldest persons in the elemen­ tary school group left school twenty years before they were tested, the youngest college graduates were only a couple of years out of college. They also belonged to different cohorts.