Proyecto 3E

Information, choice, and access in Chilean higher education

What students believe, what they choose, and what it costs them

Proyecto 3E is a long-running research agenda on access to higher education in Chile. The project links three decades of centralized college-admissions records to administrative tax and student-loan data, to high-school records, and to large-scale surveys of applicants' beliefs about future earnings and costs. The combined database follows fifteen cohorts of Chilean high-school graduates as they apply, enroll, switch majors, take out federal loans, drop out or graduate, and enter the labor market.

A central thread is information: what do students believe about the costs and labor-market returns of different careers and institutions, where do those beliefs come from, and how does providing better information change the choices students make? A second thread is policy design: what happens when student loan availability is tied to past graduates' earnings, and what are the equilibrium effects on programs and institutions?

Selected work