Efficiency of the colombian educational system and social inequality

Resumen

This thesis analyzes the efficiency of the educational system in a developing country with an emphasis on different sources of social inequality. Additionally, two phenomena of great importance are taken into account: the armed conflict, and the voluntary contributions of private organizations to education. The analysis is developed with innovative methods, taking a non-parametric approach using conditional order-m and the metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger index. These models are applied in each chapter to schools throughout the country, different municipalities and students who are lagging behind and who belong to a specific program. The introductory chapter motivates and presents the general context in which the analysis is carried out, presents specific aspects of the Colombian educational system and the two phenomena studied, sets out the objectives and specific contributions of the research, and finally, shows the databases and methodologies used to address the research questions. This document contains three empirical chapters. In the first, the changes in productivity of 4,587 schools are measured considering the inequality between students and the differences between public1 and private schools. To do this, we consider the students who participated in the Saber 11 standardized test between 2014 and 2017 in the subjects of mathematics, reading, sciences, social and citizen sciences and English. To calculate the change in productivity between these years, a metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger index is used since it can take into account both outputs and bad outputs. The second empirical chapter analyzes the relationship between homicides due to armed conflict and educational efficiency in 912 municipalities between 2014 and 2018. A conditional order-m is used to calculate the potential loss of efficiency of municipalities due to the armed conflict since it is ideal for including context variables in efficiency estimates. Finally, the third empirical chapter evaluates the causal impact on the educational efficiency of a tutoring program of 6,455 students who are lagging behind; a combination of experimental and efficiency evaluation methodologies is used. The conclusions, contributions, and implications for public and educational policy and future lines of research are presented in the final chapter.