Working Less to Earn More : An Application to the Analysis of Rigidity in Educational Choices

International audienceThe low mobility of french secondary-school graduates toward the most profitable higher education programs highlights the inadequacy of the traditional model of educational demand to describe individual choices. Taking into account the distinctiveness of the french higher education system, this paper offers a model for bacheliers' choices based on an endogenization of educational costs. If the advantages of holding a degree are obviously beyond students' control, the same is not true of educational costs which depend on students' actual efforts to win the degree. As in the classical model, the bachelier chooses the highest yielding educational program among those offered to him. Here the endogenization of educational cost increases the number of alternatives. It helps to understand the preference for degrees that have low job-market value but require only a minimal effort to obtain. It also provides an explanation to the apparent rigidity of choices since it reveals that within a given course, students can increase their expected educational return by reducing their academic effort