Figure 6

Comparison between the absolute differences in unemployment levels of pairs of degree programs in a treatment group (black vertical line) against different control groups (horizontal). The treatment group corresponds to 1177 connected pairs of degree programs in the Higher Education Space. Each control group (of the same size as the treatment group) is a set of pairs of degree programs matched through the propensity score matching [57] with the pairs in the treatment group. Similarities measure the Euclidean distance among pairs of degree programs in different control groups: random (dark orange), education fields of the ISCED classification (purple), gender (red), application scores (green), demand-supply ratio (orange) and all the last three features (blue). Error bars in the control groups indicate the standard error in the estimation of the averages therein and the shaded area is the standard error for the treatment group. Statistical significance was measured by a t-test between the treatment and control averages—all differences are significant with \(p\mbox{-values}< 0.01\)