Do grants improve the outcomes of university students in a challenging context? Evidence from a matching approach

    Marta Facchini, Moris Triventi & Loris Vergolini

Higher Education (2020)

In this paper, the authors investigate whether grants improve the academic outcomes of students from socio-economically disadvantaged families and thereby reduce inequalities of educational opportunities. They focus on Italy, which is characterized by high dropout rates, prolonged duration of higher education studies and considerable social inequalities in educational outcomes. To estimate the effect of grants, they follow a counterfactual approach, relying on a reweighting matching procedure. First, the authors apply coarsened exact matching to identify the region of common support. Second, they weight the observation using the entropy balancing method. They use a nationally representative survey, which collects data on students who graduated from upper secondary school in 2004 and 2007. The paper underlines that grants reduce dropout and increase timely graduation, with larger effects among males and students in Central-Southern Italy, who are more at risk of withdrawal from university.

This paper is available online, on Springer Link (6th July 2020). It's also available in the pre-print version (with appendix), deposited on SocArcXiv (April 2019).