On the causal effects of selective admission policies on students’ performances: evidence from a quasi-experiment in a large Italian university

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit a quasi-experiment occurred in a large public university located in Southern Italy, to examine whether the introduction of a selective admission test affects students’ performances. Our analysis on this unique data set shows that a change of regime to a restrictive admission policy reduces the dropout rate of first year students by about 14%, increasing their grade point average by 0.78 points. Interestingly, in addition to the increase in the average quality of admitted students, our results suggest that positive effects of a policy change to the testbased selective access largely operate through the impact of a better quality of peers on individual performances. Results are robust to various robustness checks. Compared with other studies using a similar approach, our own provides evidence that selective admission policies can induce different educational outcomes in different geographic areas of the same national system of higher education.