Pedro da Silva

Title: The design of optimal admission policies to higher education: an applied theoretical approach

Abstract: We study the college admission problem focusing on the choice of admission exams, by the higher education institutions. We incorporate the effort across admission exams as a choice variable by the student. The university faces a trade-off between increasing the number of admission tests, and thus gaining information about student’s ability, and requiring one single test that is strongly related to future labour market performance. We set up a two-stage sequential game in which universities set the admission criteria and students must comply throughout the application process. We solve the game by backward induction. Students take into account the cost of effort in a pure strategy Nash Equilibrium. In an empirical application we study the impact of different admission criteria on student’s earning at the Portuguese higher education system. We rely on individual micro data on the population of applicants to public higher education institutions over a period of eleven years [method and results to be completed].

Lunch from 12.30pm