Sitting next to a dropout: Study success of students with peers that came to the lecture hall by a different route

Daniel Goller, Andrea Diem and Stefan Wolter

No 190, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Higher education brings together students from diverse educational backgrounds, including students, who after dropping out of a first course of study, transferred to an academically less demanding institution. While peers are important contributors to student success, the influence of those dropouts with a knowledge advantage on first-time students is largely unexplored. Using an administrative data set covering every individual in the Swiss higher education system, we study the impact of the presence of academically better prepared students on the study success of first-time students. Our identification strategy relies on conditional idiosyncratic variations in the proportion of returning dropouts in university of applied sciences cohorts. We find negative effects of university dropouts who re-enroll in the same subject on the success of first-time students. In contrast, dropouts who change subjects are positively associated to the success of their new peers. Using causal machine learning methods, we find that the effects (a) are non-linear and (b) vary for different proportions of dropouts in university of applied sciences cohorts.

Keywords: University dropouts; peer effects; better prepared students; causal machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A23 C14 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-his and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0190

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