HIEST seminar 12 March 2024: Kristian Koerselman

 Financial incentives for on-time graduation: when students turn down free money

In RUU E314 Isa; to attend online please register here.

Presentation summary:
From the summer of 2005 onward, students enrolling in Finnish higher education were offered an on-time graduation incentive in the form of conditional student loan forgiveness. We study this reform using register microdata on four cohorts of Finnish higher education students. We find no evidence that the reform would either have caused more students to take up student loans, or would have caused more students to graduate on time. We add to the literature both by evaluating the effectiveness of an understudied student aid instrument, and by illustrating how the effects of incentives packaged into student loans can be hard to predict in advance.

Presenter: Kristian Koerselman (http://economistatwork.com)

Presenter background: Dr. Kristian Koerselman is Senior Researcher at the Finnish Insitute (FIER) for Educational Research and at the University of Jyväskylä School for Business Economics (JSBE).