Essays on the economics of higher educationTools Silva, Pedro Luis (2021) Essays on the economics of higher education. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis thesis focus on the choice of university admission requirements. The first chapter studies which admission requirements to Higher Education are better predictors of students' success. More specifically, I explore the differences in national high-stake exams and teacher scores used by Economics and Management degrees. I find that the teacher scores are a stronger predictor of students' performance at university. In the second chapter, I study whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests, or on the basis of a broader set of skills and knowledge. The empirical analysis is guided by a theoretical framework. The theoretical model shows that although broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them as a criterion for selection alongside the mastery of more subject-specific tools. This is so because broader skills allow the university to select candidates who are on average abler. I test the model on a large administrative dataset of Portuguese students. My central finding is that, on average, universities with less specialised admission policies admit a pool of students who obtain a higher final GPA.
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