How student choice consistency affects the success of applications in Portuguese higher education

ABSTRACT

In the context of a political imperative to reorganise the Portuguese higher education system, a deep knowledge of student choice decision-making processes when applying to higher education is needed. Following a ‘combined model’ of student choice, which emphasises economic and social factors, this paper aims to answer two main related questions: (i) what are the determinants of student choice consistency? (ii) Does choice consistency affect the admission of students to their top preference? Both are analysed within a multinomial logit framework. The results indicate that males, older students and better performing students are more likely to be consistent in their choices in the various forms it may assume. Students with inconsistent choice sets are more likely to be accepted; nevertheless, they are more likely to get a place in a second-best alternative.

KEYWORDS:

• Choices
• preferences
• access in higher education
• consistency
• successful applications

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Carla Sá http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3255-4687

Orlanda Tavares http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8750-2032

Notes

1. Disciplinary areas were classified according to the National Classification of Education and Training Areas (CNAEF, Classificação Nacional de Áreas de Educação e Formação).

2. The data have information on 40,430. Because there are 311 students without information on previous performance, a key explanatory variable to the present analysis, those students have been excluded, and the sample ended up with 40,119 individuals, who have been used in the descriptive statistics computation and the model’s estimation.

3. These proportions have been computed based on the dataset in use in the main econometric analysis.

4. Computations based on the dataset in use in the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by the projects UID/CED/00757/2013 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), awarded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in Portugal.