Essays on education: From Indonesia to Los Angeles, CA

This dissertation is a two-part essay on access to education and educational outcomes in two very different parts of the world: Indonesia and the United States. While the two countries are at different stages of educational development, we focus on the young population who may be disadvantaged from achieving socially desired levels of education.;First, from the developing country of Indonesia, young children who fail to obtain minimum level of education are studied. In 1994, the government of Indonesia extended universal education from primary to junior secondary school. Enrollment at junior secondary schools remain below universal, with the largest dropouts coming from the transition between primary school and junior secondary school. This essay examines the primary-junior secondary school transition for young adults from Indonesia using the the four waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey from 1993 to 2007. I find the socio-economic-status of the family plays a significant role in the students dropping out after primary school, with parental education having the largest effect. A similar pattern is found for the junior-senior secondary school transition and for a younger cohort of teenagers. When the primary-junior secondary transitional dropouts are tracked from the previous waves to the latest wave, the dropouts are more likely to have been married, pregnant, working in agriculture, earning less, and rate themselves lower in general subjective wellbeing.;Second, from the city of Los Angeles, CA, community college students are studied with respect to their placements in mathematics courses. All students must satisfy a mathematics requirement prior to earning an associate degree or transferring to a 4-year institution. Based on the results of a single assessment, most community college students are placed in developmental math courses. However, concerns about placement accuracy have led states and colleges to consider using multiple measures to inform placement decisions. While student background measures such as high school GPA, prior math course-taking, and noncognitive traits are known to be predictive of college outcomes, there is limited evidence of their usefulness for course placement. We provide evidence from California, where community colleges are required to use multiple measures, and examine whether the use of multiple measures increases access and success in college-level courses. We find that students who were placed into higher-level math only due to the use of multiple measures, particularly via prior math background and via high school GPA, performed no differently from their higher-scoring peers in terms of passing rates and long-term credit completion.