Necessary but Not Sufficient? Youth Responses to Localised Returns to Education in Australia

In this paper, the 2001 Australian Census is used to estimate predicted net benefits of education at a small geographic level. These are then linked to youth in the areas to test the associations with high school participation. This is done separately for Indigenous youth, a population sub-group with historically low levels of education participation. The results confirm that, in general, localised predicted benefits of education do have a significant association with participation. For the Indigenous population, however, there is no significant association between the predicted income benefits of education and participation and only a weak association with the employment benefits. (Contains 5 tables and 4 notes.)