Education 2025-07-21

We identify the impacts of a student's timetable on their attendance, study time and academic achievement using administrative and survey data from a public UK university across a broad range of degree programmes using quasi-random assignment of students to their timetables. Timetable measures include back-to-back classes, single-class days, time-of-day, day-of-instruction and long hours. We observe hourly attendance decisions. Findings indicate that student attendance at the event level is highly dependent on the timetable structure. Single-class days reduce attendance and back-to-back classes raise it. We are able to show that students compensate for marginal non-attendance at some events with increased attendance at other events on the same module, or among more conscientious students, with increased study time. Net of all behavioural responses to the timetable, these features have little impact on academic attainment. Delavande, Adeline Del Bono, Emilia Holford, Angus J. Williams, Kevin education production, schedules, timetables, higher education, human capital, attendance, effort 2025-07 We study the impact of higher education (HE) on marriage incidence in China using the 2017 China Household Finance Survey. Taking advantage of the dramatic HE expansion starting in 1999, we explore the effect of education on marriage outcomes by instrumenting years of schooling using the interaction of childhood urban hukou status and a set of time dummy and trend variables capturing the exposure to the expansion. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the 2SLS results suggest that increased education induced by the HE expansion leads to higher marriage rates. These positive effects tend to be larger for women living in coastal areas or larger cities. The estimates are robust to alternative specifications, age range, the age cut-offs for childhood hukou status and controls for birth cohort-city specific sex ratios. Our findings imply that the strong negative relationship observed between college education and marriage outcomes for women is likely driven by educational assortative mating due to persistent gender norms in favour of status hypergamy, which prevents the Chinese marriage market from adjusting to the reversed gender gap in HE post-expansion. Huang, Bin Tani, Massimiliano Xu, Lei Zhu, Yu higher education expansion, 2SLS, marriage market outcomes, educational assortative mating, China 2025-07 What happens when college students cannot enroll in the courses they want? Using conditional random assignment to oversubscribed courses at a large public university, we find that a course shutout reduces the probability that a student ever takes any course in the corresponding subject by 30%. Course shutouts are particularly disruptive for female students, reducing women's cumulative GPAs, probability of majoring in STEM, on-time graduation, and early-career earnings. In contrast, shutouts do not appear to be disruptive to male students' long-run outcomes, with one exception—shutouts significantly increase the probability that men choose a major from the business school. Kevin J. Mumford Richard W. Patterson Anthony Yim 2025-05 Using the universe of high school and college admissions data in Croatia, we geocoded nearly half a million students' residential addresses to investigate how their college and major choices are influenced by older neighbors and peers. Using an RDD to exploit time and program variation in admission cutoffs, we find that having an older neighbor who was admitted to and enrolled in a program increases a student's probability of applying to the program by about 20%. We find that this effect consistently holds only for the closest neighbors, both in terms of distance and age difference. Female students are more likely to be influenced by older neighbors' choices, and male older neighbors' admission has a larger impact on both male and female students compared to female older neighbors. The effect is stronger if the student-neighbor pair lives in a region that does not have its own university, implying that the value of information in rural areas is higher. We find evidence that students don't follow their older neighbors to less competitive programs; instead, they are more likely to apply for the same programs their older neighbors were admitted to when the program is more prestigious. Next, we utilize the variation in weight scheme of Croatia's college study programs to show evidence, beyond college choices, of how older neighbors affect the human capital formation of their younger peers. The main channel through which we observe this effect is during high school, through specialization in the subjects needed to gain admittance to older neighbors' college programs. These findings shed light on the intricate dynamics shaping educational decisions and underscores the significant role older neighbors play in guiding younger peers toward specific academic pathways. Backes, Annika Kovač, Dejan college-major choice, human capital accumulation, neighbors, peer effects 2025 This paper examines the impact of a reform aimed at expediting graduation times in Italian universities by reducing the number of exams students must pass to obtain the fixed number of credits required to graduate. Using event-study estimates that leverage the reform's staggered implementation, we find that this policy change led to an increase in on-time graduation rates but also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. However, this negative effect reverses into a positive one in the medium run. We show that these patterns are explained by students using the time gained from earlier graduation to pursue additional educational qualifications in the year following graduation. Davide Malacrino Samuel Nocito Raffaele Saggio higher education, policy evaluation, time to graduation, labor outcomes 2025 The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in today’s global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning. We identify the causal effect of subtitling in a difference-in-differences specification that compares English to math skills in European countries that do and do not use subtitles. We find a large positive effect of subtitling on English-language skills of over one standard deviation. The effect is robust to accounting for linguistic similarity, economic incentives to learn English, and cultural protectiveness. Consistent with oral TV transmission, the effect is larger for listening and speaking skills than for reading. Frauke Baumeister Eric A. Hanushek Ludger Woessmann Christiane Baumeister language skills, English as a foreign language, TV, movies, dubbing, subtitles 2025 In advanced economies, increasing population diversity often fuels hostile attitudes toward immigrants and political polarization. We study a short educational program for high-school students aimed at promoting cultural diversity and improving attitudes toward immigration through active learning. To identify the impact of the program, we designed a randomized controlled trial involving 4, 500 students from 252 classes across 40 schools in northern Italy. The program led to more positive attitudes and behaviors toward immigrants, especially in more mixed classes. In terms of mechanisms, the intervention reduced students’ misperception and changed their perceived norms toward immigration, while it had no impact on implicit bias, empathy, or social contacts. Our findings suggest that anti-immigrant attitudes are primarily driven by sociotropic concerns rather than individual intergroup experience, and that educational programs combining critical thinking with cross-group discussion can correct them. Giunti, Sara Guariso, Andrea Mendola, Mariapia Solmone, Irene social inclusion policy, ethnic stereotypes, immigration attitudes, impact evaluation 2025-06