This paper contains a comparison of high school completion rates across Australian States and Territories from 1989 to 2002. These completion rates, known as 'retention rates', have a number of well-known deficiencies. When we adjust 'official' 2002 retention rates to take account of these...

This paper analyses high school completion rates, known as ‘apparent retention rates’ in Australia, from 1989 to 2002. Unlike most measures of educational attainment or participation in Australia, the apparent retention rate was lower at the end of the 1990s than it had been in the early...

Outside the United States (U.S.), very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13-14), we find a small but statistically...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...

This paper describes the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), Australia's income contingent charge mechanism, and analyses its impact on the social composition of university participation. We analyse university participation data from three cohorts of young Australians. The first cohort...