@phdthesis{discovery1540174,
          school = {UCL (University College London)},
           title = {Widening participation in higher education. Policies and institutional settings: cross-country perspectives and an empirical analysis of Chile},
            year = {2017},
          editor = {K Hansen and G Wyness},
       booktitle = {University College London},
           month = {February},
            note = {Unpublished},
        keywords = {Higher education, Inequality, Access, Persistence and dropout, Chilean higher education, Higher education reform, Quantitative methods, Impact evaluation},
        abstract = {In the last three decades, Higher Education (HE) has experienced an unprecedented
expansion worldwide. In many countries, governments have transferred the cost of HE
from taxpayers to individuals and households as a means of increasing the provision
on a financially sustainable basis. Most policies have attempted to address the issue
of low-income students' participation by setting student aid policies for those unable
to afford HE costs. Nonetheless, the starting point of this thesis is that the goal of
equity in HE should not begin with, or be confined to, HE policy but must address
school education as well. I investigate the effect of the socioeconomic distribution of
school achievement on HE enrolment rates in a cross-country framework. I find a mild
but statistically significant negative association suggesting that the more school
achievement is determined by socioeconomic factors, the less participation in HE is
observed. Next, I evaluate the impact of a reform to the student aid system in Chile
using household surveys and regression-based and differences-in-differences evaluation
techniques. I find the reform increased the probability of access of low-income students
to HE by 6 percentage points, or 20 per cent in proportional terms.
After having researched the effects of inequality of school achievement, I focus on the
design of student aid and its effect on persistence and dropout. In particular, I
investigate the level of harshness of different aid programmes and its effect on
students' persistence, completion, and dropout rates. By specifying a logistic
multinomial model, I compare the effect of two loan programmes, an incomecontingent
loan and a mortgage-type, bank-managed, government-guaranteed loan.
The harsher, mortgage-type loan was associated with increased persistence and higher
completion rates but no difference in dropout rates. Nonetheless, this association was
only observable for low-income students; loan harshness made no difference in
completion rates for better-off students. In other words, harsher loans seem to be a
deterrent only for poor students. This introduces an ethical dilemma: although harsher
aid may be more effective, should student aid be disproportionately putting pressure
on the poorest students? However, this may in turn reflect poor student's relative
higher ability rather than a differential deterrent effect.},
             url = {https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1540174/},
          author = {Uribe Jorquera, DA}
}