By Magali Ramos Jarrin PhD, University of Cambridge and 2023 GEM Report fellow
The 2020 GEM Report showed that “the expansion of tertiary education has been unprecedented but accompanied by persistent vertical and horizontal inequity.” Policies around access to higher education play a crucial role within this, with the financing of school and higher education potentially affecting equitable outcomes via institutional resourcing and staffing. This blog summarizes research I worked on as a GEM Report Fellow using nationwide data in Ecuador from 2018 to understand the institutional conditions (at school and higher education) associated with students’ access to public universities.
My study focuses on students’ trajectories into public higher education and institutions. It explores how the distribution of resources to schools and public universities affects institutional material and human conditions and how this may be related to equitable access to public universities. It used large-scale administrative data, linked together for the first time. It illuminates the extent to which equitable access to higher education has been implemented in Ecuador and serves as a blueprint for the monitoring of progress in other contexts.
Context
Contrary to global trends, the Ecuadorian government intensified public investment in higher education during the decade of the 2010s, becoming the country with the second largest increase in investment in higher education worldwide, equivalent to an average of 2% of its GDP. The increase was triggered by a legal reform in 2010 aimed to promote a knowledge-based economy as a national development model. Between 2012 and 2017 the country implemented five main strategies: 1) establish fee-free public higher education at the undergraduate level through a constitutional reform; 2) close 14 private universities of low quality and create 4 new public universities; 3) create a centralized admissions process to manage access to public higher education institutions based on standardised test results; 4) introduce scholarships and a student loan scheme; 5) increase university budgets distributed through a formula that rewarded quality. These strategies were funded by approximately USD 8 billion in 6 years. This study focuses on the policy of centralized access to higher education.
Methodology
In order to address the issue of equitable access to higher education in Ecuador, administrative datasets were linked for the first time. Ecuador has two institutions in charge of education: the Ministry of Education (for primary and secondary education) and the National Secretariat for Higher Education, Science and Technology (SENESCYT) (for post-secondary education). Both institutions provided anonymized datasets upon formal request in order to investigate the research questions. Similarly, universities provided information based on the 2018 SENESCYT Report on the Formula for Budget Allocation of Public Universities. The Ministry of Education also provided a dataset with a school conditions index. This enabled information from both types of institutions to be linked for the first time.
Findings
This study tackled three research questions.
What is the relation between student personal characteristics and public university access? Students who are female, from ethnic minorities (especially Indigenous), from the Pacific Coast region, and have disabilities are less likely to access the best public universities, mostly concentrated in the Andes region.
What are the school conditions of students who access higher education? Students from schools with the best learning conditions and infrastructure and with the fewest students from ethnic minorities have higher probability to access the best public universities.
What is the financial behaviour of inclusive universities? University expenditure may be classified as ‘efficient’ or not when their budget per capita is analysed against an index of inclusiveness and quality. Universities were classified in four groups – those in the second group are efficient:
- High quality, low inclusion, high budget
- High quality, high inclusion, average budget
- Low quality, low inclusion, low budget
- Low quality, high inclusion, low budget
Distribution of students who accessed public universities, 2018
Based on information of quintile of school of origin and quintile of university of destination
Source: Ecuador Ministry of Education and Ecuador Secretariat for Higher Education, Science and Technology.
Universities of the highest quality have the largest budgets but lag behind in terms of equitable access (understood as accepting students from ethnic minorities, with disabilities and females). Overall, budget per capita and quality decrease as universities are more inclusive. This trend, however, is challenged by some institutions that manage to keep mid- to high-level quality and inclusivity.
Index of university quality and inclusivity, by institution and budget per capita, 2018
Source: Own calculations based on Ecuador Secretariat for Higher Education, Science and Technology data
Recommendations
The study showed that inclusion and quality are not mutually exclusive in universities and do not always depend on budget.
The policy recommendations on the transition from secondary to tertiary education are based on a systemic understanding of the Ecuadorian education system. They take into consideration the recent reforms to improve access to higher education in 2023, with the process of admissions decentralized down to public universities. In particular:
- Trajectories matter: Secondary school conditions are a key element to accessing higher education. Infrastructure, teacher knowledge and student outcomes can hinder or enhance opportunities for students seeking a place at a public university.
- Affirmative action points are not sufficient: Looking at individual level determinants, points awarded as part of affirmative action policy by 2018 were not sufficient to ensure that high quality universities were socially inclusive.
- Formula for distributing resources to universities should include equity: Opportunities are not only unevenly distributed among students who access public universities, but funds are also unevenly distributed among universities. In this context, the funding formula is a policy tool for distributing resources and equity must be prioritized when considering students and institutions.
