 The COVID-19 pandemic: A threat to higher education?Marina Bonaccolto-Töpfer and Carolina Castagnetti No 117, Discussion Papers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics Abstract: Transition to online teaching during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to various concerns about educational quality. So far, researchers have mainly focused on the effects on school teaching. This paper looks at the effects on a large Italian university (University of Pavia, Lombardy). Administrative data allows us to track both students' evaluation of teaching and student performance. Using a difference-in-differences design, we exploit the fact that the summer term 2020 started right after the first lockdown and compare students' outcome during this term to those of the same term in the previous year. In contrast to the literature, our results suggest no substantial effects of the pandemic on higher education. The findings are robust across various dimensions of courses, students and lecturers. In particular, the results suggest also no difference between top and bottom students or students from wealthier and poorer families. Keywords: Online teaching; COVID-19 pandemic; difference-in-differences; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:faulre:117 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Papers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.