Selective university admissions as a strategy of autocratic rule

Universities present a dilemma for autocrats: they are often fertile grounds for anti-regime protests, but also necessary for educating a skilled workforce that ensures economic productivity. Solving this dilemma through indoctrination and repression can be costly and inefficient. I investigate a third strategy autocrats use to resolve this trade-off: strategic student admissions. By preferentially admitting regime-loyal students, indoctrination becomes easier and monitoring less costly. To counter efficiency problems, however, autocrats enforce admission criteria selectively: they value loyalty signals more in fields more likely to generate dissent---the social sciences/humanities---and less strongly in fields less exposed to critical thinking and more relevant for economic productivity, such as the natural/technical sciences. I find empirical support for these implications using detailed admission records from more than 234,000 university applications in the former German Democratic Republic. By unpacking a key repressive strategy this study clarifies how universities can help to stabilize autocracies.