A comparison between two systems of university education: years of study versus credit accumulation

Catherine Dehon and Léonore Lebouteiller

Education Economics, 2025, vol. 33, issue 2, 258-276

Abstract: A recent major reform of higher education has changed a year-based system into a credit accumulation one. We use this exogenous shock to compare the two systems. Using a longitudinal dataset of undergraduate students from one of the largest French-speaking universities, a competing risks survival analysis is performed to study the probabilities and duration to graduation or dropout. The results indicate that the credit accumulation system encourages students to be less engaged in their studies, at the cost of late graduation in the best case, and in the worst case, late dropout which affects mostly students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2023.2301333

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