Data, Insights and Blog Posts
The Medical Mirage: Why Ethiopia's Best and Brightest Flock to Medicine Despite Low Pay?This paper studies how college admission selectivity affects the college field choice of students in a centralized, field-specific admission system. I leverage a college admission policy reform in Ethiopia that sharply increased the share of college seats in public universities allocated to STEM fields. The reform substantially decreased the admission selectivity of STEM fields. Using cohort analysis and a regression discontinuity design, I show that students are significantly more likely to choose STEM fields after the reform.
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