Do Reforms Aimed at Reducing Time to Graduation Work? Evidence from the Italian Higher Education System
This paper examines the impact of a reform aimed at expediting graduation times in Italian universities by reducing the number of exams students must pass to obtain a fixed number of credits. Using event-study estimates that leverage the reform's staggered implementation, we find that this policy change led to an increase in on-time graduation rates. However, it also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. This negative effect vanishes in the medium run, suggesting that the reform's compliers—students who managed to graduate on time under the new regime but would have been delayed in the pre-reform regime—might have engaged in less intensive job search efforts immediately after graduation.
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