IZA World of Labor - Gillian Wyness

Gillian Wyness

UCL Institute of Education, UK

I’m very happy to contribute to the IZA World of Labor series on a subject I think is fascinating and important. I hope it will be useful to other academics interested in evidence about the nature and extent of university mismatch

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Associate Professor of Economics, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) at the UCL Institute of Education, UK; Research Associate, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, UK

Research interest

Economics of higher education

Website

https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=GWYNE77

Past positions

Research Economist, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, UK

Qualifications

PhD Economics, UCL Institute of Education, 2009

Selected publications

"Minority report: The impact of predicted grades on university admissions of disadvantaged groups." Education Economics (Forthcoming) (with R. Murphy).
"The end of free college in England: Implications for enrolments, equity, and quality." Economics of Education Review (2019) (with R. Murphy and J. Scott Clayton).
"Student awareness of costs and benefits of educational decisions: Effects of an information campaign." Journal of Human Capital 10 :4 (2016) ( with M. McGuigan and S. McNally).
"Higher education, career opportunities and intergenerational inequality." Oxford Review of Economic Policy 32:4 (2016): 553–575 (with C. Crawford, P. Gregg, L. Macmillan, and A. Vignoles).
"Money for nothing: Estimating the impact of student aid on participation in Higher Education.” Economics of Education Review 43 (2014): 66–78 (with L. Dearden and E. Fitzsimons).

- Education and human capital
What is the nature and extent of student–university mismatch?

Students do worse if their abilities fail to match the requirements of the institutions where they matriculate

Gillian WynessRichard Murphy, June 2020

A growing body of research has begun to examine the match between student ability and university quality. Initial research focused on overmatch—where students are lower attaining than their college peers. However, more recently, attention has turned to undermatch, where students attend institutions with lower attaining peers. Both have been shown to matter for student outcomes; while in theory overmatch could be desirable, there is evidence that overmatched students are less likely to graduate college. Undermatched students, meanwhile, have been shown to experience lower graduate earnings.
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