Introduction to symposium on unmeasured heterogeneity in school transition models

Researchers have used models of school transitions for over 30 years to describe inequality of educational opportunity and have contributed a number of important refinements and extensions. School transition models have the complication that the estimated effects of family background on the probability of continuing in school are affected by differential attrition on unobserved factors at earlier stages of schooling. The articles in this symposium present a variety of useful approaches to unobserved heterogeneity in school transition models. Investigators who use these approaches should attend to several issues: (1) models for school transitions may be used both descriptively (and are not therefore subject to any well-defined “bias”) and as tools for causal inference. (2) The concept of bias presupposes an underlying experiment, structural model, or population model that would, in principle, define the corresponding unbiased parameters – yet these underlying models are difficult to specify for school transition models. (3) Unobserved determinants of whether individuals make school transitions may be both exogenous and endogenous with respect to the observed regressors in the model. Without a model of how unobserved heterogeneity arises, attempted “corrections” for unmeasured heterogeneity may yield misleading estimates of the effects of measured determinants of school continuation.