Tuition fees and social segregation: lessons from a natural experiment at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine

ABSTRACT

Using a natural experiment, a sharp rise in tuition fees in some of the programmes at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine, we study the impact of tuition fees on students’ pathways, and outcomes. We apply an optimal matching method to the national database of students’ registrations (SISE) to define a typology of pathways. We then use a nonordered multinomial logit model to evaluate the impact of the rise in tuition fees on the types of pathways selected by the university. We show that there is a significant impact on these pathways. The increase in tuition fees reduces geographic and social mobility, thereby accentuating the phenomena of social segregation. Furthermore, contrary to what some of the studies assert, the rise does not appear to encourage greater effort: we find no impact on the graduation success rate.

KEYWORDS:

• Tuition fees
• student pathways
• student achievement
• optimal matching analysis
• difference-in-differences
• natural experiment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I22
• I29

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff at the French Ministry of Higher Education (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, Direction Générale de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de l’Insertion Professionnelle, Direction Générale de la Recherche de l’Innovation, Sous-Direction des Systèmes d’Information et des Études Statistiques (MESR-DGESIP-DGRI/SIES)) for their precious help in collecting the data. The authors thank the participants to the various seminars and conferences where this work has been presented as well as Philippe Aghion, Hans-Dieter Gerner, Hans Dietrich, Jean-François Giret, Laurent Lesnard, Matthias Studer, Hélène Zajdela and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Système d’Information sur le Suivi de l’Étudiant. We use the ‘universities-enrolments’ and ‘universities-results’ databases.

² Application de Gestion du Logement et de l’Aide à l’Étudiant.

³ The matching between these databases is based on the encrypted National Student Identifier (INE).

⁴ The MESR distinguishes between the fields of universities, engineering schools, management schools, ENS (Écoles Normales Supérieures) and private higher education.

⁵ In this article we do not consider students in apprenticeship or in lifelong education, because: (i) the payment of their tuition fees by their employer belongs to a completely different approach to that of initial education, and (ii) the existence of those options is not specific to Dauphine.

⁶ Sequential analysis is not limited to optimal matching methods. Many other methods exist and could have been used in this work. We chose these methods because the results obtained during the classification stage were more robust and more relevant to our subject. The clusters obtained allow us to describe more coherently the diversity of trajectories leading to enrolment in the second year of a master’s at Dauphine. See Studer (2012) for a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the different measures of distance.

⁷ The matrix of substitution costs is presented in Table A1 in the Appendix.

⁸ In addition to Ward’s method finally chosen, we considered the following methods: nearest neighbour method, farthest neighbour method, average, median, centroid, mcquitty, beta-flexible, Diana and partitioning around medoids.

⁹ This characteristic can be largely ascribed to the fact that some of these students spent two years in preparatory classes for the grandes écoles (parallel to their enrolment at university) before joining Dauphine to complete their bachelor course.

¹⁰ We obtained the situation of students in the previous year by matching the SISE ‘universities-enrolment’ and ‘universities-results’ databases.

¹¹ Foreign students can only apply for a CROUS scholarship (Centre Régional des Oeuvres Universitaires et Scolaires) if they have been living in France for 2 years and their ‘parent of reference’ has completed a statement of means in France.

¹² Scholarships on social criteria for students of French nationality are granted by the CROUS, whereas those for which foreign students can apply are granted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.