The Effect of a Tuition Fee Reform on the Risk of Drop Out from University in the UK

Steve Bradley and Giuseppe Migali

No 86010138, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: This paper investigates whether the increase in university tuition fees in 2006 changed student drop out behaviour. Using data on multiple cohorts of first year students who enrolled between 2003-2010, we estimate duration models controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. Our findings suggest that the policy reform reduced the hazard of dropping out by 16 percent, however, there were differences in the impact of the reform in terms of income groups, the type of university attended and the subject studied. The effect of the reform was not just a one off, but persisted for a number of years after 2006. Drop out behaviour in the post-reform period was also affected by the recession in 2008, and there may have been possible changes in the composition of the student population, which makes it difficult to quantify the full effect of the tuition fee increase. Finally, the tuition fee reform had a spillover effect on the drop out behaviour of Scottish students attending Scottish universities, a group exempt from the tuition fee reform.

Keywords: tuition fee reform; dropouts; duration analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I22 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2015_016.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lan:wpaper:86010138

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().