Disentangling Faculty Efficiency from Students’ Effort

In this chapter, we provide an empirical methodology that allows to monitor the performance of university students through data that are routinely produced and stored by universities. This approach disentangle the portion of the students’ academic achievement controlled by the institutions’ activities from the portion directly influenced by the students’ own effort, offering novel insights on the performance of universities and potentially supplementing the information from the standard league tables. Our procedure is applied to a sample of 37,459 first-year students from a large Italian university based in the South of Italy from academic year 2004-2005 to academic year 2010-2011. The evidence suggests that the efficiency with which faculties delivers their activities matters to female students and to students from low income households. Pre-enrolment information such as the high-school grade and type are good proxies of the student’s own effort.