Leaving Home for University or Commuting? The Impact of Relocation Scholarships on Academic Progression

This study examines the impact of an additional relocation component of need-based scholarships on academic performance. Exploiting an Italian policy that assigns a higher grant to recipients residing more than 60 min from the university, we implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate a local average treatment effect for students at the margin of the travel time cutoff. We find that scholarship recipients induced to relocate accumulate fewer credits and obtain lower average grades than comparable commuting scholarship holders. The results are robust to alternative bandwidth choices and placebo tests. Exploratory analyses suggest that program characteristics and economic vulnerability may explain part of the performance gap, although indirect effects are small relative to the direct effect. Overall, the findings suggest that, for marginal low-income students, relocation eligibility is associated with weaker academic progression. The results apply to scholarship beneficiaries near the policy threshold and should be interpreted as local effects within this institutional context.