**Please note: The Dissertation Workshop is a graduate educational seminar and is open only to graduate students and their advisors.**
In this workshop, Mikko Silliman will present the effects of a policy that provides middle schools in Helsinki with extra resources and assistance in developing effective strategies to support immigrant children and disadvantaged students. He uses difference-in-differences, sibling-differences, and triple-differences strategies to compare the outcomes of students exposed to the policy to those of students not exposed to the policy. Despite only having modest effects on academic performance, the policy has large and persistent effects on later outcomes.
Immigrant students exposed to the policy are more likely to graduate on time and enroll in higher education, and less likely to be idle upon graduation or have a child as teenagers. These findings highlight the role schools can play in closing immigrant-native gaps in later outcomes, and suggest that evaluations of policies that do not take into account non-academic measures, may understate the magnitude of the effects of educational interventions for immigrant students.
