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Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Closing Gaps in Postsecondary Education Trajectories: Direct and Indirect Effects of Information and Personalized Counseling".

Expone: Andrés Barrios Fernandez, Profesor Asistente, Universidad de los Andes.

Co-autores: Josefina Eluchans y Fernanda Ramírez.

Abstract: This paper evaluates two interventions designed to help students to decide about their postsecondary educational trajectories in Chile. We implemented a large-scale RCT that reached around 27,000 high school senior students and followed them for two years after high school, combining rich survey and administrative data. Consistent with previous research, we find that providing information alone improves students' understanding of the higher education system but does not make a difference in their probability of applying to or enrolling in college. In contrast, providing information and counseling increases students' probability of taking the college admission exam by 13 percentage points, of applying for funding by 9.2 percentage points, and of enrolling in higher education by 7 percentage points. The counseling intervention appears to help students navigate complex application procedures, as they express high demand for higher education but often struggle with completing funding applications. The design of the RCT—i.e., offering the counseling program to only a few students in each class—also allows us to study spillovers of the program on the classmates and friends of treated students. We find evidence of significant social spillovers. The classmates of students in the counseling program become 6 percentage points more likely to register and take the college admission exam. Nevertheless, they do not become more likely to apply for funding and therefore we find no increase in their college enrollment. Close friends of treated students become 3.3 percentage points more likely to apply for funding and 2.3 percentage points more likely to enroll in higher education. These results suggest that social spillovers can multiply the effect of policies designed to expand access to higher education, but these multiplicative effects depend on proximity between students and on task complexity.

El formato será presencial en la sala T-1605.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación