Science Education and Upper-Tail Human Capital: Evidence from the Dutch HBS
Science Education and Upper-Tail Human Capital: Evidence from the Dutch HBS
The Hogere Burgerschool (HBS) was a new science-oriented secondary school aimed explicitly at the Dutch middle class. This paper exploits its staggered rollout to estimate the causal effect of access to scientific secondary education on the formation of upper-tail human capital. I link archival HBS establishment records to the student registers of all five Dutch universities, a national biographical dictionary, and father–son occupational pairs, and find that opening an HBS raised the number of a municipality’s children who went on to university by roughly sixteen per treated municipality per five-year cohort bin, and raised the population-scaled enrolment rate by about 3.7 per 10{,}000 inhabitants, more than doubling the baseline rate among never-treated municipalities, with the response concentrated in the science and medical faculties that the HBS’s beta-heavy curriculum targeted. The production of scientists and biographically notable persons also rose, while broad-population occupational-attainment effects are absent, consistent with an effect concentrated in the upper tail of the human-capital distribution rather than a general rise in average mobility. The results identify modern, science-oriented secondary schooling as a channel through which upper-tail human capital was produced.