The Right to Learn at Risk? On the Causes and Solutions to Teacher Shortages and Tutoring Markets

Ensuring equitable and adequate access to learning opportunities is a crucial policy objective to ensure the quality and equity of education systems around the world. However, students across OECD countries face inadequate and unequal access to teachers and tutoring. Almost all OECD countries face increasing shortages of teachers, which are particularly acute in disadvantaged schools. Additionally, students in higher education struggle to graduate (in time), while facing potentially unequal access to supplementary private tutoring. The overall aim of this dissertation is to provide novel insights into the origins and solutions to these policy challenges by focusing on the individual decisions that drive them using data from the region Flanders. By combining randomized controlled trials, discrete choice experiments, and fixed effects panel data models, this dissertation provides new evidence on the individual choices that shape teacher supply and tutoring markets. Across the first three empirical chapters, the dissertation addresses the earlier cited knowledge gaps throughout the "leaky pipeline" of teacher supply. Chapter 1 examines how negative media coverage and positive information about teachers' esteem influences students' and pre-service teachers' intentions to teach using two RCTs. Chapter 2 combines discrete choice experiments with a wide range of survey questions to understand how working conditions and alternative career opportunities drive pre-service teachers' decision of whether or not to become a teacher. Chapter 3 maps the low job stability that beginning Flemish teachers face and estimates its effect on their retention probabilities. Additionally, it estimates whether a permanent substitute policy can be a cost-effective policy to tackle teacher shortages and unfilled absences. Chapter 4 shifts the lens to tutoring in higher education, measuring consumption of private tutoring and evaluating the potential of public tutoring programs to improve educational attainment and social mobility with a focus on students' preferences. Together, this dissertation contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how information, preferences, job conditions, and policy affect individuals' educational and career decisions. These insights inform policymakers on how to design cost-effective policies that foster adequate and equitable learning opportunities for all students.