You Are the Elite Now: Admission Effects of an Excellence Initiative in the Chinese Higher Education System

Tianze Liu () and Meng Meng ()
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Tianze Liu: Department of Economics, Uppsala University
Meng Meng: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Postal: SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

No 5/2024, SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: This paper examines how university applicants in China respond to a government policy that designates specific university-discipline units as centers of excellence. Affecting over 10 million applicants annually, the policy aims to enhance human capital and global competitiveness, potentially improving the quality of professional skills in the workforce. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we analyze the policy’s impact at three levels: (1) Within disciplines, we find that the excellence designation increases competition by attracting higher-ranking applicants to designated units; (2) Within universities, we observe spillover effects, with non-designated disciplines also benefiting from increased competition, likely due to students perceiving non-designated disciplines within the same university as excellent; (3) At the university level, institutions with designated disciplines experience a significant rise in overall admission competition compared to those without such designations. Our findings underscore that discipline-specific excellence designations effectively attract higher-ranking applicants to designated disciplines and elevate the university’s overall competitiveness. The spillover effects suggest that students perceive an institution-wide enhancement of quality, possibly due to shared resources and administration. Consequently, students may be strategically responding to both specific and general signals of excellence, anticipating employer preferences for graduates from these recognized institutions regardless of discipline.

Keywords: elite university; Double First-Class initiative; admission competition; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2024-10-24
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