Does admission to elite engineering school make a difference?

This paper explores the effects of university quality in STEM education by examining the consequences of admission to Finland’s most competitive engineering school for students’ performance in their studies and the labor market. Using data from the centralized admission system for engineering degree programs, we estimate these effects for marginally admitted elite school applicants who also applied to and had the opportunity to be admitted to a less competitive engineering school. Our results show that being accepted by the elite engineering school leads to a more advantaged initial peer group and a sharply higher probability of eventually graduating from that elite school but does not, on average, result in significantly better early-career labor market outcomes. However, we find that admission to the elite school significantly increases the earnings of students whose parents are not highly educated.

Publication Information

Kuuppelomäki, T., Kortelainen, M., Suhonen, T., & Virtanen, H. (2019), Does admission to elite engineering school make a difference? VATT Working Papers 127, VATT Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki.