Choice and Inequality: Transition from Secondary to Tertiary Education in Chile

Higher education is increasingly desired by families because it is seen as an important mechanism of social mobility that allows students to achieve better living standards. However, access to higher education appears consistently correlated with student socioeconomic status. The lack of prior opportunity to study a curricular program that provides both the quality and content required to proceed to higher education is suggested as the most important barrier. It is worrisome, then, that some low-income, high-performing students who expect to continue to higher education choose programs with lower-level content or quality.

This study utilizes the case of Chile to explore whether choice between vocational and academic education at secondary level (VESL and AESL respectively) could help to the reproduction of inequality throughout the diversion of high-performing low-income students from the academic to the vocational track.  This study approaches a causal analysis combining propensity score matching and robustness check strategies. It also uses an ad hoc survey and a rich panel of censal data that follows students from eighth grade to higher education.

The findings show that socioeconomic status, culture, the environment, and self-perception are correlated with enrollment in VESL. In addition, there is an important gap in the national entrance test to higher education between comparable VESL and AESL students (0.2 – 0.5 SD). Results also show that high-performing, low-income VESL students are less likely to go to a bachelor degree program and more likely to enter a vocational program at tertiary level than a comparable AESL student. Finally, VESL students tend to have a lower persistence at vocational tertiary education than AESL students. Hence, VESL could be distracting and preventing some low-income, high-performing students from obtaining better incomes, employability, and social status, ultimately reducing their social mobility. In this way, choice could be contributing to the reproduction of inequality.