A research study analyzes the economic outcomes of bilingual education
Introducing Catalan as language of instruction with the Language Standardization Law in 1983 brought an increase of the economic performance in education among the cohorts of people affected by this reform. This is stated in the conclusions of the study “Bilingual Schooling and Earnings: Evidence from a Language-in-education Reform, published in Economics of Education Review, by the UB lecturer Antonio di Paolo, together with the lecturer Lorenzo Cappellari, from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan). The main results of the study show that each additional year of teaching brings an increase of monthly income, during the working life of students, at 6.5 %. However, if school has taught students in Catalan and Spanish with the bilingual system from the Language Standardization Law, this performance rises by 7.9 %. Therefore, being exposed to a bilingual education increased education performance by 1.4 percentage points. The study concludes that the reform promoted opportunity equality in a bilingual working market.
Introducing Catalan as language of instruction with the Language Standardization Law in 1983 brought an increase of the economic performance in education among the cohorts of people affected by this reform. This is stated in the conclusions of the study “Bilingual Schooling and Earnings: Evidence from a Language-in-education Reform, published in Economics of Education Review, by the UB lecturer Antonio di Paolo, together with the lecturer Lorenzo Cappellari, from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan). The main results of the study show that each additional year of teaching brings an increase of monthly income, during the working life of students, at 6.5 %. However, if school has taught students in Catalan and Spanish with the bilingual system from the Language Standardization Law, this performance rises by 7.9 %. Therefore, being exposed to a bilingual education increased education performance by 1.4 percentage points. The study concludes that the reform promoted opportunity equality in a bilingual working market.
The authors used the 2006 and 2011 Survey on Habits and Living Conditions of the Catalan Population (ECVHP). They specifically selected people who were born between 1961 and 1982 in Catalonia, or the other autonomous communities in Spain, who moved to Catalonia before they were 7. Since they did not have specific information on the level of exposure to bilingualism at an individual level, the authors built a measurement of potential exposure in the bilingual school according to the year of birth and school years. To do so, it is thought that people who were born before 1966 were not affected by the Language Standardization Law (since they had already finished the pre-university studies in 1983) and they form the control group. Those born between 1966 and 1976 underwent a partial exposure to Catalan-Spanish learning, since they had entered the educational system that came with the reform, while other people who were born after 1977 underwent a total exposure to the reform (i.e. all studies under bilingual system).
The authors conducted a series of tests to rule out the option that these results could be caused due other factors which are not related to the influence of Catalan schooling. The evidence of these tests shows that the main results of the study are tough and can be gradually associated with the effect of the school bilingualism, caused by the introduction of Catalan at school.
In addition, the authors carried out other estimations to verify the existence of other heterogeneous effects of those years of bilingual school-exposure, according to different indicators in regard to the sociolinguistic origins of the interviewee. The results show the positive effect of the reform in the economic outcome of education to be more visible among people whose parents were born outside Catalonia or Spanish-speaking parents and a lower level of education. These students benefited more from Catalan as a school language with the Language Standardization Law, since it enabled them to acquire skills in this language which were similar to those of the other students. Therefore, the reform that brought Catalan to the schools, building a bilingual education system, benefited the promotion of opportunity equality in a bilingual working market, where the knowledge of both languages is essential for professional success.