The effect of the Italian University reform on student career: the case of the University of Trieste

Over the period 2001/2005 Italy experienced an expansion of enrollment in higher education benefiting from the Bologna Process. This paper evaluates the effects of this policy on academic performance: we compare the performances of students who switch from pre-reform university courses to post-reform ones with that of students who stay in pre-reform university courses. The aim of the paper is to estimate the difference in graduation probability, allowing for the changing university regime (the treatment), job opportunities and other characteristics of the students.We considered a sample of 25,866 undergraduate students enrolled at University of Trieste, which is reduced to a balanced sample of 1,020 units by matching techniques. Estimates of a logistic models on the balanced sample suggest that the treatment effect differs between the “old” and the young students: the treatment appearing beneficial for the younger ones only.