Improving Access to Tertiary Education in Colombia: Overcoming Financial and Informational Constraints

In the developing world, vocational training has been proposed as a potentially promising educational alternative to improve employability and school-to-work transitions among youth. We investigate whether access to post-secondary scholarships improves tertiary education access among socioeconomically disadvantaged students (Experiment I), and the role of informational constraints in the decision to attend tertiary education (Experiment II).  In Experiment I, collaborating with the local Government of the City of Medellin, we will aim to randomly encourage students to apply for post-secondary vocational scholarships.  In Experiment II, collaborating with Colombia's National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (ICFES), we will randomly allocate various informational campaigns to secondary school seniors, aimed at testing various kinds of informational constraints in the decision to enroll in tertiary education, including lack of knowledge and inattention.  For both experiments, will use data from administrative sources, maximizing statistical power and minimizing attrition with marginal data collection costs.

*To learn more about key findings from this evaluation read School Vouchers, Labor Markets and Vocational Education