Shifting Preferences: COVID-19 and Higher Education Application

This paper provides descriptive evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced secondary school students’ application patterns to higher education in France, offering insights into the reallocation of preferences across academic fields and degree types. Using detailed administrative data, we document significant shifts in application shares during 2021, with increased interest in competitive tracks and concurrent declines in applications to bachelor’s and vocational programs. These findings suggest that students responded to the pandemic by favoring structured and selective pathways with clear labor market prospects, while moving away from generalist degrees. Students’ share of applications to STEM degrees increased, while applications to health and business programs remained stable. At the same time, analyzing the probability of applying to at least one program in a given field or degree reveals a decline in application diversification, as students concentrated their choices in fewer fields, reflecting a more risk-averse and selective approach in response to the pandemic. Our analysis highlights substantial heterogeneity in these effects across demographic groups.