Supply and Demand in the Context of School Choice: The impact of school characteristics and student composition on the demand for secondary schools in Berlin

With schools gaining more autonomy and increasingly emphasizing differentiated school profiles, the competition for students amongst schools intensifies, especially in urban areas. Differences in enrollment rates between schools are one result of this increasing competition and, thus, can be considered a measure for the demand for individual schools. The current study focuses on the analysis of this kind of demand-data and investigates differences in the demand for secondary schools in the federal state of Berlin in the school year 2014/15. Firstly, we pursued the question of which school characteristics can explain differences in the demand for secondary schools. Secondly, we examined the relationship between the existing supply of and observed demand for schools with specific scholastic programs. The results show that the demand for schools is mainly positively associated with a better composition of the student body as well as school characteristics, which indicate a qualitatively higher and quantitatively broader scholastic program. Furthermore, it seems like there are differences between the observable demand and the actual supply of schools with specific characteristics.