Paving the Path: Effort, Expectations and College Access

• In Event: Equality and Equity in Higher Education

Proposal

In the context of developing countries, access to higher education remains a challenge, with financial barriers often cited as a primary obstacle. My research, set in Chile, explores barriers to access to higher education, using as a source of variation the unconditional free college tuition policy aimed at the poorest 60% of families, enacted in 2016,

So far, expected changes in higher education enrollment due to the policy are not conclusive. Clasing (2022) and Carpentier (2021) find no effects on college enrollment, while Espinoza et al. (2023) find mixed effects on college persistence. Nevertheless, Johnson (2023) finds that higher education institutions react to the policy, leading to around 40% of students benefiting from it. However, the policy does not have a net effect on access to education, as increases in access for eligible students are offset by increases in tuition and displacement to the outside option for non-eligible students.

While financial aid is a significant factor in higher education access, this study also delves into non-financial barriers, specifically effort, as reflected in academic performance and attendance, and parental expectations regarding their children's educational attainment. Providing unconditional free college tuition might as well increase these school-level measures of effort exerted by parents and students. By lowering the costs of schooling, returns to college become more significant. Thus, students become more incentivized to exert the needed effort to get admitted to college, which might indeed be a necessary condition for the policy to show significant results. Golightly (2019) finds that the Texas Top 10% rule, which guarantees state college admission to all Texas high school students in the top decile of their graduating classes, positively impacts attendance, graduation, and academic performance in students
of low-income high schools. Therefore, another approach to explain the lack of changes in enrollment is to look at intermediate outcomes or possible paths to getting more low-income students into college.

Using longitudinal multi-cohort census-level data, first, I document the persistent socioeconomic disparities in learning levels, college enrollment, academic achievement, and college-going parental expectations. For this, I estimate how parental expectations and effort have evolved longitudinally across several cohorts. To do so, I use Chilean administrative data on student attendance and GPA (as a proxy for effort) at the population level for children entering first grade between 2002 and 2013, merged with information about parental expectations from census-level parent questionnaires applied alongside standardized tests. I find that significant income-related disparities appear at the juncture between middle and high school. I show that SES gaps in GPA and attendance become disproportionately larger for low-income students and that the gap in expectations is large and persistent across cohorts and over students’ school life (Figures 1 through 5).

Then, I exploit the introduction of the Chilean free college tuition on expectations held by parents about the student’s future educational attainment and their exerted effort toward attaining college access. I employ Chilean administrative data for the student cohort starting grade 1 in 2008, encompassing student enrollment, academic performance, attendance, and parental expectations from census-level questionnaires. A longitudinal Difference-in-Difference (DiD) model is applied to assess the policy's impact, comparing outcomes before and after its implementation across different income groups (targeted vs. non-targeted). The parallel trends assumption is tested for each outcome.

I find no significant changes in academic performance or attendance attributable to the free tuition policy. Despite increased access to financial resources for higher education, the expected improvements in academic effort among eligible students did not materialize. In contrast, the policy substantially raised parental expectations for their children's educational futures. This shift suggests that while financial aid can alter perceptions about educational attainment, it may not directly influence student behavior toward achieving higher academic goals.

The disconnect between heightened parental expectations and stagnant student effort underscores the complexity of educational access barriers. The findings suggest that financial policies alone may not address the deep-rooted challenges that low-income students face, including motivation, academic preparation, and support systems.

These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the efficacy of financial-only interventions in education policy. It calls for a broader approach to college access policies, emphasizing the need for comprehensive support systems that address non-financial barriers, including academic preparation, counseling, and family engagement.


References

Carpentier, Sebastián. 2021. “Los efectos de la gratuidad en la Educación Superior.”

Clasing, Paula. 2022. “The Promise of Free Tuition: The Case of Chile.” PhD diss.

Espinoza, Oscar, Bruno Corradi, Luis González, Luis Sandoval, Noel McGinn, Karina Maldonado, and Yahira Larrondo. 2023. “The effects of free tuition on the persistence of university students in Chile.” International Journal of Educational Development, 101: 102838.

Golightly, Eleanor. 2019. “Does College Access Increase High School Effort? Evaluating the impact of the Texas Top 10% Rule.” Job Market Paper.

Johnson, Esperanza. 2023. “Supply responses to targeted government aid: Evidence from free college in Chile.” Job Market Paper.

Author

• Joaquin Farina, Harvard University