| Abstract |
We study the short-run and long-run impacts of changing school admissions systems in higher education. To do so, we take advantage of the world’s first known implementation of nationally centralized admissions and its subsequent reversals in early twentieth-century Japan. The centralized system was designed to make admissions more meritocratic, but our analysis show that meritocracy came at the cost of threatening equal regional access to higher education and career advancement. Specifically, in the short run, the meritocratic centralization led students to make more inter-regional and risk-taking applications. As high ability students were located disproportionately in urban areas, however, increased regional mobility caused urban applicants to supplant rural applicants from higher education. Moreover, the impacts of admission reforms were persistent: four decades later, compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system increased the number of urban-born elites (e.g., top income earners, high-ranking bureaucrats) relative to rural-born elites.
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