Free is not enough - the long-run impact of free education on cognitive function in older age: Evidence from Ireland

Dementia is a major and growing global health challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where most of the world’s older population will reside in the coming decades. As no curative treatments exist, increasing attention has turned to prevention, with education repeatedly identified as one of the strongest protective correlates of late-life cognitive decline. Whether this relationship is causal, however, remains an open question, as existing evidence has produced mixed findings.

This paper investigates the long-term cognitive effects of expanded access to secondary education by exploiting the 1967 Irish Free Education reform, an unexpectedly introduced national policy that abolished secondary school tuition fees and expanded transport and book subsidies. Using data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), we implement a regression discontinuity design, based on quasi-random exposure to the reform by birth cohort.

Our study finds that the reform substantially increased the duration of schooling, with the largest gains—nearly one additional year—among individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds. However, we find no evidence that these increases translated into improvements in global cognition, executive function, processing speed, or attention in older age, nor into better labour market or health behaviour outcomes that could serve as mediating pathways.

Drawing on historical administrative data, we show that the reform triggered a rapid influx of students without commensurate investment in school infrastructure or teacher capacity, generating conditions consistent with a decline in educational quality. These findings highlight that expanding access to education, while essential, may not be sufficient to produce long-term cognitive benefits unless accompanied by adequate investments in instructional quality—an insight highly relevant to countries currently expanding free secondary education.