Informationen und Übergänge in ein Masterstudium: Welche Bedeutung hat dieser Zusammenhang für Studierende mit niedrigem sozioökonomischen Status?
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
What do students know about the returns to a postgraduate degree? And how does their knowledge influence their decision to enroll into a postgraduate program? We study these questions by showing German undergraduate students information about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to post-graduate education, in a randomized controlled trial (henceforth, RCT). We measure impacts of our randomized treatment on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns and how this affects postgraduate enrollment intentions six months later. Moreover, we provide evidence on realized enrollment in postgraduate education one and two years after treatment. The treatment consists of information about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate versus undergraduate degrees in the labor market, based on empirical data of existing employees. The treatment is delivered at the end of an online survey to a randomly selected subgroup of our sample. The control group does not receive the information. The study population was recruited out of an existing experimental panel study that focused on the initial college-going decision of high school students of the 2014 graduation cohort in the Berlin area, Germany. We use the information collected in the intervention and the three follow-up surveys that we conducted six months, one year and two years after treatment in four steps. First, we confirm the correlation between perceived returns and postgraduate enrollment intentions. The results show than perceived returns matter for students’ choices. Second, we test if the treatment has shifted individual beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education. The main finding here is that many students previously either held very accurate beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary differences between graduate and postgraduate jobs, or did not significantly update their beliefs due to our online information intervention. Significant updating occurs only for males, who downward adjust their expected postgraduate earnings premium. We explore reasons for this gender heterogeneity and discuss that it can be related to differences in initial beliefs or differences in updating, i.e. processing of the new information. Third, we find effects on enrollment intentions that mirror the effects on belief updating documented above: males are significantly less likely to state the intention to directly enroll for a postgraduate degree following the successfully completion of their undergraduate studies. Fourth and finally, we estimate effects on postgraduate enrollment one and two years after initial treatment. Here, we also find the largest and negative, yet not statistically significant, estimates for male students. This study provides the first causal evidence of the role of information for postgraduate enrollment decisions. Despite our finding that male students react strongly to our information treatment, and female students do not, this does not imply that males and females place a different importance on information when making decisions. Differences in belief updating and information processing pre-sents an alternative explanation to heterogeneity in treatment effects of information treatments.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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(2020). Masterstudium ja oder nein? Gezielte Online-Informationen beeinflussen weitere Studienpläne. DIW Wochenbericht, 87(21), 359-367
Berkes, J., Peter, F., Spieß, C. K., & Weinhardt, F.
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Information Provision and Postgraduate Studies (No. 12735). Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Economica
Berkes, J., Peter, F., Spiess, C. K., & Weinhardt, F.
