Education Across the Island of Ireland: Examining Educational Outcomes, Earnings and Intergenerational Mobility

In terms of the existing literature, McGuinness and Bergin have shown substantial gaps between educational attainment levels in Northern Ireland and Ireland.2 Furthermore, Bergin and McGuinness found that the rate of early school leaving in Northern Ireland was almost twice that of Ireland, with the analysis indicating that early school leaving in Northern Ireland is much more heavily concentrated. [...] It has also been suggested in a number of studies that such gaps in educational attainment are likely to be a significant factor in explaining the substantial productivity gap that has been observed between Ireland and Northern Ireland.3 The recent publication by Smyth et al.4 is the first to systematically compare the education systems and outcomes in the two jurisdictions from primary to 1 Emer. [...] The marginal effect of the impact of low parental education on the probability of a child having a poor educational outcome is about twice as large in Northern Ireland as is the case in Ireland (Figure 5). [...] We next attempt to quantify the proportion of the observed wage gap that we can attribute to differences in the educational endowments of the two regions, and the results from the decomposition analysis described in equation 2 are reported in Table 4. [...] The continued use of academic selection in Northern Ireland, and the associated economic cost and social inequality associated with the selection system, is likely to be a contributory factor limiting the extent to which the educational system in Northern Ireland facilitates intergenerational educa- tional and earnings mobility.