Does Class Size Matter in Postgraduate Education?

Alessio Gaggero () and Getinet Haile

No 12628, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The paper examines the impact of class size on postgraduate grades using administrative data from one of the largest Schools of a Russell Group University in the UK. As well as estimating Fixed Effects models on the population of postgraduate candidates in the School, we exploit a policy change aimed at reducing class size to implement a regression discontinuity design (RDD). We find that class size does impact grades adversely overall; and the policy aimed at reducing class size impacts grades favourably. Our findings are robust to alternative specifications as well as being supported by the validity tests we conducted.

Keywords: grades; class size; higher education; RDD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Manchester School, 2019, 88 (3), 489-505.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12628.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does class size matter in postgraduate education? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12628

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().