Using detailed Danish administrative data covering the entire population of students entering higher education in the period 1985 to 2010, we investigate the importance of a student’s peers in higher education for the decision to drop out. We use high school GPA as a predetermined measure of student ability and idiosyncratic variation in peer composition across cohorts within the same education and institution. Our findings suggest that peer ability is an important determinant of students’ drop out decisions as well as later labor market outcomes. Overall, we find that a one standard deviation increase in peers’ high school GPA reduces the probability of dropping out by 4.6 percentage points. This number masks considerable heterogeneity by level and field of study. Allowing for a more flexible specification, we find that low quality peers have adverse effects on the probability of dropping out while high quality peers have beneficial effects. These effects are more pronounced for lower ability students.

使用涵盖 1985 年至 2010 年期间进入高等教育的整个学生人口的详细丹麦行政数据，我们调查了学生在高等教育中的同龄人对辍学决定的重要性。我们使用高中 GPA 作为预先衡量的学生能力和同一教育和机构内同龄人组成的特殊变化。我们的研究结果表明，同伴能力是学生退学决定以及后来的劳动力市场结果的重要决定因素。总体而言，我们发现同龄人的高中 GPA 增加一个标准差会使辍学概率降低 4.6 个百分点。这个数字掩盖了研究水平和领域的相当大的异质性。允许更灵活的规范，我们发现低质量的同伴对辍学概率有不利影响，而高质量的同伴则具有有益的影响。这些影响对于能力较低的学生更为明显。