The roads we choose with Michela Tincani

It’s just a phase, you’ll change your mind, you’ll think differently when you’re older – familiar phrases that echo throughout your teenage years. As you get older sometimes (if somewhat begrudgingly) you accept that they might be right, but these phrases always seem at odds with one of the biggest decisions you make – going to university.

Whether you decide to go to university, where you go, and what you learn when you get there is a huge decision, and one you make before you can vote or buy a round in the pub. Whether you are surrounded by information and opinions from others, from prospectuses and forums, or not, that decision is one that shapes your adult life.

For Dr Michela Tincani, it shaped her career.

“I actually studied economics by accident,” she laughs.

“I was going to do chemistry. Everybody knew I was going to do chemistry. My chemistry teacher knew. I knew. Everybody knew! But then I decided I wanted to go to a big city because I'm from a small village, and the university there didn't even have chemistry! They only had social sciences and so I chose economics.”

Leaving behind her Alpine home of Lago Maggiore, Tincani studied at Rome’s Luiss University, and the snap decision she made as a teenager shaped her life. Now, as an Associate Professor of Economics at UCL and a Research Fellow at the IFS, her research explores the relationship between education and social inequalities, with a focus on university admissions.

“I've spent the last ten years studying preferential university admissions for students who are disadvantaged – policies known as affirmative action. Growing up, I had a sense that maybe it was not necessarily the most talented students, or those who put in more effort, but it really mattered what you knew about university.”

Preferential admissions, often known as affirmative action policies, are the cause of frequent debate. This debate usually revolves around ideas of merit and deservedness, or in the case of the recent backlash to equality, diversity, and inclusion policies, “wokeness”.

But economics, as Tincani reminds us, can bring data and methods to the conversation, grounding them in facts and figures, rather than philosophical discussions of meritocracy.

Over the past decade, she has been working with the Chilean government and their Programa de Acompañamiento y Acceso Efectivo a la Educación Superior (Programme for the Support and Effective Access to Higher Education, PACE).

Introduced in 2014 by then President Michelle Bachelet, in part in response to the 2011–2013 Chilean student protests, PACE is one of the most extreme examples of an affirmative action policy. Students who graduate in the top 15% of their high school obtain a guaranteed university admission.

Over ten years, Tincani and her colleagues have been collecting data in a randomized experiment which compares the outcomes of those students who went to university under the policy, and their schoolmates who did not. It is this comparison that is crucial to the work – instead of comparing PACE students to their more privileged coursemates, we need the counterfactual data. How would these students have fared without the opportunity?

“What we find is quite nuanced, which suggests there's no easy answers. We follow these students and see if they go to higher education, if they persist, what they do after, and what their earnings are,” explains Tincani.

 “On average, the targeted students do better with this opportunity than without. To give you an idea, these students are a couple of years behind in terms of knowledge compared to those who normally go to university. It's one of the most extreme policies that has been put out there, and they actually did better. Their graduations from universities increased, their earnings on average increased.”

Yet the data also reveals the potential negative consequences of such policies. The students at the bottom of the cut-off for PACE places feel they must attend university but often drop out. The loss of earning potential straight after high school persists over the following few years, potentially damaging students in the long term. These negative effects were concentrated among those students who were least informed about university.

Her work has also led her to Italy, where she is about to begin a new project. In Italy, students have a choice of their scuola secondaria di secondo grado – three schools which lead either to university, technical college, or vocational college. This choice is frequently informed by recommendations from their teachers.

“What the data show is that you could have students who are equally good in terms of their grades, but one is from a disadvantaged background and one is from an advantaged background. In these cases, teachers are more likely to recommend the higher track to the advantaged student and the lower track to the disadvantaged student.”

“These are students who have equal academic skills, but families from low socioeconomic backgrounds tend to follow the teacher recommendations.”

Tincani explains how she and her colleagues hope to intervene at that stage with information about the various options students have and how they can thrive in different paths.

“We're thinking of exploiting machine learning and artificial intelligence to do this at scale through an app. We're planning a randomized experiment to evaluate an intervention – where students and parents can have information on their phones. A student who is from a disadvantaged background can see: actually, I can go to the high track - someone who looks like me, who had the same grades I had, went to the same kind of educational establishments as I have, can actually do well even in the high track.”

Looking to the future, where does this work lead, and how can her research enhance students' experience at university?

“Maybe it's not that you're not prepared enough academically. Maybe you arrive at university and you feel so different from everyone else, which makes it harder to continue. How do these students interact with their more advantaged and privileged peers? Do they interact as much as they could? Do they reap all the benefits they could reap from the networks they can make at universities? This is something that we don't have a solution for yet, but it's something that we’re interested in studying more.”

“On top of that, we are using economic simulation models that allow us to predict the effects of policies that don't yet exist. We hope to use these models to advise governments, but they take time to build.”

With this knowledge, I ask Tincani what she would tell herself, back on the shores of Lago Maggiore before she picked economics.

“I would tell myself not to be so harsh on myself, but that's just from age, not from my research! I would go back and reason with my younger self”, she says, ever the believer in the power of logical argument.

“I’d say “look at these other options, this is what could happen to you if you make this decision.” It's such an important choice and you make it when you're so young, and I definitely realized in hindsight that I was so uninformed.”

A happy accident though.

She laughs, “In the end it turned out fine because I found something I love about economics, I love my job, I'm very happy with what I did.”