Educational attainment

• Private school students are more likely than public school students to complete a bachelor’s or advanced degree by their mid-20s.

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, "Fourth Follow-up" (NELS:1988/2000) show that students who had attended private school in 8th grade were twice as likely as those who had attended public school to have completed a bachelor’s or higher degree by their mid-20s (52 versus 26 percent) and far less likely to have had no post-secondary education (figure 10). Even students from low-SES backgrounds attained higher levels if they had been private school students in 1988. Specifically, 7 percent of students in the lowest SES quartile who had attended public school in 1988 had earned a bachelor’s degree by 2000, whereas 24 percent of their private school peers had done so (table 13). In addition, for students whose mother’s expectation (in 8th grade) was for them to attain an associate’s degree or less, those who had attended private school completed a bachelor’s or higher degree at a rate about four times that of public school students (30 versus 7 percent). Furthermore, students who came from a low-SES family but had completed a calculus course in high school were much more likely than those who had not studied calculus to earn a degree by their mid-20s (71 versus 6 percent). Students in private schools are more likely than those in public schools to take challenging courses like calculus, and private schools are more likely to require them, as discussed in the preceding section.