Determinants of students' success at university

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the determinants of academic success using a unique administrative data set of a German university. We show that high school grades are strongly associated with both graduation probabilities and final grades, whereas variables measuring social origin or income have only a smaller impact. Moreover, the link between high school performance and university success is shown to vary substantially across faculties. In some fields of study, the probability of graduating is rather low, while grades are quite good conditional on high school performance. In others, weaker students have a greater chance of graduating, but grades are more differentiated.

KEYWORDS:

• University
• high school
• grade point average
• faculties
• education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I23
• I21

Acknowledgments

We thank Alexander Esseling and Felix Albrecht for very competent assistance in data handling, and Madhinee Valeyatheepillay for carefully proof-reading the text. Responsibility for the content remains with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Detailed information on data filtering and processing can be found in Appendix A.

2. GfK is one of the biggest companies worldwide in the field of market research and collects information on people's lifestyle and consumption behavior.

3. Private universities, distance universities, art and movie colleges, conservatories as well as special colleges of education and theology are not taken into account.

4. Source: Statistisches Bundesamt 2010, own calculations.

5. We transformed the grades into the U.S. grading scale by subtracting the final university grade from five. For legal studies the special grade ‘vollbefriedigend’ is treated as a 2.5.

6. The coefficients of the probit regressions can be found in Tables A.1–A.3.b in Appendix B.

7. These payments are based on the income of the parents and the student. They can amount to up to 670 Euro per month (2010) of which only 50% are to be repaid, capped at a maximum amount due of 10,000 Euro. In winter term 2009/2010 almost 20% of all students in Göttingen received payments according to this act.

8. Since in the regressions for graduation within faculty and grades we have more than one observation for several students, we re-estimated these equations with standard errors clustered at the student level. This leads only to minor changes in the standard errors and significance levels.

9. The faculty of law is traditionally known to only rarely award very good grades. Accordingly, not too much attention should be given to this fact.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) under grant number 01PW11004.