Selective Admission and Freshman’s Academic Outcomes

Post date: 05-Jul-2016 14:09:33

21 LUGLIO 2016, ore 11.30, Sala Riunioni Primo Piano

Relatore: Dott. Aktas Koray, Università Cattolica, Milano

Titolo: Selective Admission and Freshman’s Academic Outcomes

Abstract: Italian higher education system has been suffering from high college drop-out rates for almost three decades and has undergone some significant education reforms during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet Italy still has one of the highest college drop-out rate among the OECD countries. After the failure of last reform, which is known as "Bologna Process", some universities have started to carry into execution some ex-ante selection procedures in order to admit more high-performing students. This paper aims to provide an evidence on the causal effects of selective admission test on the academic outcomes of freshmen by exploiting a unique administrative data from Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore which is a leading private university based in the North of Italy. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, our main findings suggest that the introduction of the admission test reduces the drop-out rate of first year students on average about 2.5% and increases the average credits about 3.67 point. We support these results by running several placebo diff-in-diffs regressions using the pre-treatment years in our data. We also look at the heterogeneous effects of reform and found that the selection procedure is even more beneficial for the low-ability students. Finally, we provide some insights on the effects of the selection procedure's components, and the results show that only mathematic section has a significant effect on the reduction of drop-out rates.