| Summary: | This thesis focus on the choice of university admission requirements. The first chapter studies which admission requirements to Higher Education are better predictors of students' success. More specifically, I explore the differences in national high-stake exams and teacher scores used by Economics and Management degrees. I find that the teacher scores are a stronger predictor of students' performance at university. In the second chapter, I study whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests, or on the basis of a broader set of skills and knowledge. The empirical analysis is guided by a theoretical framework. The theoretical model shows that although broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them as a criterion for selection alongside the mastery of more subject-specific tools. This is so because broader skills allow the university to select candidates who are on average abler. I test the model on a large administrative dataset of Portuguese students. My central finding is that, on average, universities with less specialised admission policies admit a pool of students who obtain a higher final GPA.
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