Applied Economics Seminar Series. "How do Students Respond to Partial Information on Graduation Chances? Evidence from University Admissions in France" (Joint Work with Julien Grenet, Yinghua He, and Marion Monnet)
Published: 5 March 2025
30 April 2025. Professor Gabrielle Fack, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL
Professor Gabrielle Fack, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL
"How do Students Respond to Partial Information on Graduation Chances? Evidence from University Admissions in France" (Joint Work with Julien Grenet, Yinghua He, and Marion Monnet)
Wednesday, 30 April 2025. 15:00-16:30
Room 141A, Adam Smith Business School Building
Abstract
This paper tests if and how students react to partial information provision in France’s centralized university admissions. We exploit the Orientation Active policy, which provides applicants to some non-selective programs with a negative, positive, or mixed assessment of their program-specific graduation chance, based on the students’ past academic performance and the programs’ cutoffs. We use these cutoffs to develop a regression discontinuity design to examine the impact of receiving an assessment on students' choices. Our results reject the hypothesis that students have full information about their graduation chances at all programs, as they change their application behavior and/or enrollment decision upon receiving a positive or negative assessment. These behavioural responses, however, do not lead to improved student outcomes in the first two years of higher education. In explaining these results, we present evidence consistent with the hypothesis that students fail to fully consider the correlation between graduation chances across all programs upon receiving information from a specific program. Taken together, our findings uncover the potential pitfalls of partial information provision. We discuss implications for the design of information interventions in education settings.
Bio
Gabrielle Fack is Professor of Economics at the University Paris-Dauphine and research affiliate at PSE (Paris School of Economics), IPP (Institut des Politiques Publiques), CEPR (Center for Economic Policy Research) and CESifo. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Paris School of Economics. Her research focuses on Public Economics, with a special interest for policies aimed at reducing inequalities in access to Education and Housing.
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First published: 5 March 2025