Did the Loan System Change Student Housing?: Living with parents and housing satisfaction after the implementation of the student loan system

In September 2015, the Netherlands replaced the basic student grant with a loan-based system, abruptly changing first-year students’ financial conditions. This thesis asks whether the reform affected (i) the likelihood that students live with their parents and (ii) their housing satisfaction at the start of higher education, and whether effects differ by parental income. Using nationally representative Studentenmonitor data (2013–2018) for first-year bachelor’s students (N = 1,563), I implement a sharp regression discontinuity design around the 1 September 2015 eligibility cutoff. Within the main ±2-year window, enrolling at/after the cutoff increases the probability of living with parents by about 12 percentage points, but this effect is not robust: it disappears when expanding to a ±3-year bandwidth. By contrast, housing satisfaction falls discontinuously at the cutoff by roughly 0.26 points on a five-point scale, a result that persists across specifications and bandwidths and is...Show moreIn September 2015, the Netherlands replaced the basic student grant with a loan-based system, abruptly changing first-year students’ financial conditions. This thesis asks whether the reform affected (i) the likelihood that students live with their parents and (ii) their housing satisfaction at the start of higher education, and whether effects differ by parental income. Using nationally representative Studentenmonitor data (2013–2018) for first-year bachelor’s students (N = 1,563), I implement a sharp regression discontinuity design around the 1 September 2015 eligibility cutoff. Within the main ±2-year window, enrolling at/after the cutoff increases the probability of living with parents by about 12 percentage points, but this effect is not robust: it disappears when expanding to a ±3-year bandwidth. By contrast, housing satisfaction falls discontinuously at the cutoff by roughly 0.26 points on a five-point scale, a result that persists across specifications and bandwidths and is strongest among WO students. I find no statistically detectable heterogeneity by parental income for either outcome. Balance checks indicate cohort-composition shifts around the cutoff that may threaten continuity. Overall, the reform’s most consistent association in these data is lower housing satisfaction rather than a stable change in living arrangements.Show less

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Did the Loan System Change Student Housing? Living with parents and housing satisfaction after the implementation of the student loan system