Necessary but not sufficient? Youth responses to localised returns to education in Australia

Abstract

In this paper, the 2001 Australian Census is used to estimate predicted net benefits of education at a small geographic level. These are then linked to youth in the areas to test the associations with high school participation. This is done separately for Indigenous youth, a population sub-group with historically low levels of education participation. The results confirm that, in general, localised predicted benefits of education do have a significant association with participation. For the Indigenous population, however, there is no significant association between the predicted income benefits of education and participation and only a weak association with the employment benefits. Show more