In 2011, Chile experienced massive student protests against the marketization of education. During 2013, center-left President Michelle Bachelet proposed tuition-free higher education for Chile's families in the bottom 70th percentile of the income distribution, fueling controversy due to the uncertainty and unexpected consequences of the policy.…

Fifty years ago, the expansion of access to higher education was expected to result in greater socio-economic equality. Instead, segmentation in mass higher education systems has called into question the effective democratization of access to higher education. This phenomenon appeared first in higher income countries, allowing the identification…

This paper exploits a natural experiment that produces exogenous variation on credit access to determine the effect on college enrollment. The paper assess how important are credit constraints to explain the gap in college enrollment by family income, and what would be the gap if credit constraints are eliminated. Progress in college and dropout…

This study analyzes how access to public and private institutions of higher education in Chile has changed as the post-secondary system has become increasingly privatized. It analyses access by young people to higher education from four perspectives: funding type (public/private), gender, family income level, and ethnicity. The study uses…

Empirical analyses of higher education subsidies are commonly misleading because they disregard appropriate age composition in the parental reference population. Further distortions occur depending on parents' categorization by income, occupation, or education. This paper addresses these issues using empirical data from Chile, France, and…