The Effect of Age on College Entrance Test Score and Enrollment: A Regression-Discontinuity Approach

The consequences of single-date school entry systems, which generate a large age difference between kids in the same class, are now a widely studied subject. Published research has shown that older kids consistently outperform their younger counterparts in several outcomes while in elementary and in the beginning of high school, however, evidences are weak when one considers long-run outcomes such as wages or the probability of being employed. In this paper we use data
from a major university in Brazil to investigate whether age differences significantly affect students’ college entrance test scores and their probability of being accepted for higher education. Our results
show that older students outperform younger students on test scores and, more importantly, this difference significantly affects their likelihood of being accepted in college. These results suggest that age differences might have important long-run effects given its direct link to students’ access to higher education.