Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
4938266 Economics of Education Review 2017 53 Pages PDF
Abstract
To enhance college completion, many institutions have introduced college remedial programs. Yet, till now there is little evidence that this policy helps raise students' persistence and performance in college. To better understand how to design cost-effective remedial education, this paper studies the impact of an intervention implemented in an undergraduate economics program in Italy. This remedial policy aims at raising students' effort and performance by combining a short remedial course with the threat of re-enrolling them in the first year in case of a failure in the remedial exam. To estimate causal effects, I implement a sharp regression discontinuity design that exploits the cutoff rule used to assign students to remediation. Results indicate that this nudge-type policy fails to obtain any positive and significant effect on either persistence or performance in college.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
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