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The Importance of Peer Quality for Completion of Higher Education

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  • Humlum, Maria Knoth

    (Aarhus University)

  • Thorsager, Mette

    (VIVE - The Danish Centre for Applied Social Science)

Abstract

Using detailed Danish administrative data covering the entire population of students entering higher education in the period 1985 to 2010, we investigate the importance of a student's peers in higher education for the decision to drop out. We use high school GPA as a predetermined measure of student ability and idiosyncratic variation in peer composition across cohorts within the same education and institution. Our findings suggest that peer ability is an important determinant of students' drop out decisions as well as later labor market outcomes. Overall, we find that a one standard deviation increase in peers' high school GPA reduces the probability of dropping out by 4.6 percentage points. This number masks considerable heterogeneity by level and field of study. Allowing for a more flexible specification, we find that low quality peers have adverse effects on the probability of dropping out while high quality peers have beneficial effects. These effects are more pronounced for lower ability students.

Suggested Citation

  • Humlum, Maria Knoth & Thorsager, Mette, 2021. "The Importance of Peer Quality for Completion of Higher Education," IZA Discussion Papers 14136, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14136
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    Cited by:

    1. Modena, Francesca & Rettore, Enrico & Tanzi, Giulia, 2021. "Does Gender Matter? The Effect of High Performing Peers on Academic Performances," IZA Discussion Papers 14806, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Goller, Daniel & Diem, Andrea & Wolter, Stefan C., 2023. "Sitting next to a dropout: Academic success of students with more educated peers," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    3. Tsai, Yung-Yu, 2022. "Does undue preference lead to unfairness? The impact of teacher favoritism on teacher treatment and student achievement," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    4. Daniel Goller & Andrea Diem & Stefan C. Wolter, 2022. "Sitting next to a dropout: Study success of students with peers that came to the lecture hall by a different route," Economics of Education Working Paper Series 0190, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).
    5. Raphael Brade, 2024. "Short-Term Events, Long-Term Friends? Freshman Orientation Peers and Academic Performance," CESifo Working Paper Series 11046, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    higher education; peer quality; peer effects; dropout;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality

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