Schools vary in quality, and high-performing schools tend to be oversubscribed: there are more applicants than places available. In this paper, we use nationally representative cohort data linked to administrative education records to study the consequences of failing to gain admission to one’s first-choice secondary school in England. Our empirical strategy leverages features of the institutional setting and the literature on school choice to make a case for a selection-on-observables identifying assumption. Failing to gain a place at a preferred school had null to small impacts on short-run academic attainment, but was associated with reductions in mental health and increased smoking rates in early in adulthood. In areas which deployed a manipulable assignment mechanism to allocate school places, we detected detrimental effects on high-stakes examination outcomes. Our results show that schools are important in shaping more than just test scores, and that the workings of the school admission system play a fundamental role in ensuring access to good schools.

学校的质量各不相同，而高绩效的学校往往被超额认购：申请者多于名额。在本文中，我们使用与行政教育记录相关联的具有全国代表性的队列数据来研究未能入学英国首选中学的后果。我们的经验策略利用了机构设置和学校选择文献的特征，为可观察选择的确定假设提供了依据。未能在首选学校中获得入学资格对短期学业成绩的影响微乎其微，但与成年初期的心理健康下降和吸烟率上升有关。在部署了可操纵的分配机制来分配学校名额的地区，我们发现了对高风险考试结果的不利影响。我们的结果表明，学校在塑造考试分数方面不仅起着重要作用，而且学校录取制度的运作在确保获得优质学校方面发挥着根本作用。