Corsi pre-universitari e rendimenti degli studenti

In this paper we investigate whether remedial courses, aimed at compensating deficits in basic skills, determine any improvement in undergraduate students’ achievement. Our analysis is based on a project financed by the government of Regione Calabria, which at the beginning of the academic year 2008-09 has provided a number of training activities to all freshmen enrolled at the University of Calabria. The problems related to self-selection have been handled both using the very detailed information we have available on a large number of individual characteristics and trying to identify a control group made by students who have not participated to the training activity due to random factors. From our analysis it emerges a positive effects of remedial courses on student performance during their first year of academic career. These results are robust to the use of a matching es-timator