Student Outcomes at University in Australia: A Quantile Regression Approach*

Abstract

Students' success during their first year at university is largely influenced by their university entrance score. Personal characteristics and secondary school characteristics also impact on success. This paper uses quantile regression to investigate how the effects of these factors vary along the grade distribution. It finds that the factors which influence grades have a more pronounced impact on the success of low-achieving students than on that of high-achieving students. These results have implications for student selection and also for the way scholarships may be used to attract talented high school students.

The Characteristics of ‘Gap‐Year’ Students and Their Tertiary Academic Outcomes*

“…A final limitation is that the study has examined the relationship between academic performance only during the first year at university. This is in line with recent research on student outcomes at university in Australia by Win and Miller (2005), Birch and Miller (2006a), Dobson and Skuja (2005) and Dancer and Fiebig (2004), although the latter study has a focus on a first-year unit rather than the entire first-year academic results. This choice is typically justified by the difficulties in categorising years of study beyond the first year into 'second-year', 'third-year' and so on, due to, for example, failures and split years.…”

“…The model to estimate the determinants of students’ tertiary academic success is similar to the models presented in recent studies in the Australian literature, such as Dobson and Skuja (2005) and Birch and Miller (2006a), except for that fact that it contains information on whether the student takes a gap‐year and excludes information on school type 8 . The specification adopted is: 9…”

Student Performance in a Large First Year Economics Subject: Which Variables are Significant?*

“…4 4 See, Schoeffler (1956); Mallik and Varua (2008); Mallik and Basu (2009); Lagerlof and Seltzer (2009); Birch and Miller (2006); Ballard and Johnson (2004) for details. …”

How Important are Introductory Subjects in Advanced Economics Studies?*

“…The University Admission Index (UAI) and the Grade Point Average (GPA) are also found to have a significant influence on the performance in tertiary-level economics studies. 10 Prior knowledge of high school-level mathematics, economics and English are considered as important factors for scoring higher marks in tertiary-level studies in some existing studies (Schmidt, 1983;Birch and Miller, 2006;Mallik and Lodewijks, 2010). Nonetheless, the percentage of students who have taken mathematics at the Higher School Certificate (HSC) level 11 has been declining rapidly since 2001 in Australia, which fell to 87.1 per cent in 2009 12 from 99.6 per cent in 2001 as shown in Table 1.…”