%0 Thesis
%9 Doctoral
%A Uribe Jorquera, DA
%B UCL Institute of Education
%D 2017
%E Hansen, K
%E Wyness, G
%F discovery:1540174
%I UCL (University College London)
%K Higher education, Inequality, Access, Persistence and dropout, Chilean higher education, Higher education reform, Quantitative methods, Impact evaluation
%P 235
%T Widening participation in higher education. Policies and institutional settings: cross-country perspectives and an empirical analysis of Chile
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1540174/
%X 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.