The Effect of Tuition fee Discounts on the Achievement of the First Year Students

<p>The paper considers the problem of estimation of the effect of financial programs based on the student&#39;s academic achievement and provided at colleges, subsequent progress of student learning. This problem is interesting and necessary to study in different countries, where higher education is paid for and colleges are faced with the question of &nbsp;how could encourage the most successful students. The paper presents a literature review of existing research in this area, as well as a description of the most appropriate method of estimating the effects of exposure to financial programs &ndash; the regression discontinuity design. So, in this paper, we present the problem and descriptive statistics data for evaluation of the effect of discounts on training on student freshmen HSE.</p><p>This study examines the impact of discounts on training provided to students National Research University Higher School of Economics, on their performance. The University provides bursaries to commercial students, gleaning certain number of points before the exam passing score required for admission to the places financed from the budget. Discount applies to the period of the first year of study and its extension depends on the actual achievement in high school.</p><p>Question of whether such a policy is able to stimulate the achievement of high school students interested in not only the university administration. Study on monetary incentives and performance is important in the broader context of optimization of funding higher education in our country.</p><p>The procedure described above destination discounts HSE determined by the value of points USE. Therefore, to assess the effect of the impact of discounts on student performance, you can use the regression discontinuity design methodology. This methodology is very popular in studies of the effects of exposure, particularly in the field of education, where it has been applied for the first time and [Thistlethwaite, Campbell, 1960].</p><p>Work is devoted to estimation of treatment effects discounts on training on performance of first year students. As an estimation method we use the regression discontinuity design. Also, consider the concept of&nbsp; local quantile treatment effects and received their estimates.</p><p>Regression analysis of the mean values ​​showed no significant effect on student discounts granted first-year students.</p><p>&nbsp;Quantile regression with which obtained estimates of the effect for students with different levels of current progres , revealed a positive impact on students discounts with medium and high achievers. Positive effect for these students can be explained by the fact that the extension of the discount on the second year of study at the University of log in by the top 15% of students on the course.</p>