Adjusting Your Dreams ? High School Plans and Dropout Behavior 1

At the end of middle school, many low-achieving students have to abandon hope of getting into selective high-school programs, which may be a source of disengagement and eventually lead them to drop out of high school. Based on a randomized controlled trial, this paper shows that low-achievers can be helped to formulate educational objectives that fit better with their academic aptitudes, through a series of meetings facilitated by the school principals. By affecting high school plans of the less realistic fraction of students, the intervention is able to reduce grade repetition and high-school dropout by 25% to 40%. 1 This research was supported by a grant from the French Experimental Fund for Youth. We are very grateful for the support of the schools and administrative teams of the Rectorat de Versailles. We thank Adrien Bouguen, Bastien Michel and the many J-Pal Europe research assistants that worked on this project. We also thank seminar participants at the Paris School of Economics, London School of Economics, CREST (Paris), Tinbergen Institute (Amsterdam), Louvain-la-Neuve University, Aarhus University, University of Warwick, Austin-Bergen Education and Labor Workshop, Bergen-Stavanger Labor Workshop and the fourth IWAEE conference in Cantazaro. Goux: [email protected]; Gurgand: [email protected]; Maurin: [email protected]. 2