Admission to higher education programmes and student educational outcomes and earnings–Evidence from Denmark

This paper uses data from the central admission system for Danish post-secondary education merged with other administrative data. Applicants for admission may rank up to eight educational programmes, and I focus on first-time applicants whose first-choice are bachelor's degree university programmes with restricted admission, i.e. with an admission threshold defined in terms of the grade point average obtained from upper secondary school. Using threshold crossing as an instrument for admission in a regression discontinuity design, I find that being admitted to the first-choice programme increases the probability of completing a master's degree in that subject by about 20 percentage points. There is no clear evidence that being admitted to one of the higher degree programmes listed on the application has an effect on years of education or the probability of completing a master's degree (although point estimates indicate small positive effects). There is no robust statistically significant effect on earnings 11 years after application.