Educational Aspirations, Achievement and Societal Change
This paper studies the role of ones’ politico-economic environment in shaping educational aspirations, and how these aspirations then feedback onto longer-run choices made by individuals. We use the natural experiment of German Reunification in October 1990 to study a change in regime on youth aspirations. Through Reunification, East Germany transitioned from a socialist system with a planned economy to the capitalistic and democratic system of West Germany. Using differences across cohorts induced by timing of Reunification, we show that, shortly after the change in regime, college aspirations among high-school aged students’ in East Germany increase dramatically and, eventually, translates into a sizeable increase in the likelihood to enter college five years later.