The Contribution of Short-Cycle Programs to Student Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia

Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, Maria Marta Ferreyra, Tatiana Melguizo and Angelica Sanchez

No 10262, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. In this paper, we estimate the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and study how and why these contributions vary across programs. We exploit unique administrative data from Colombia on the universe of students, institutions, and programs to control for a rich set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics. We find that program-level contributions account for about 60-70 percent of the variation in student-level graduation and labor market outcomes. Our estimates show that programs vary greatly in their contributions, across and especially within fields of study. Moreover, the estimated contributions are strongly correlated with program outcomes but not with other commonly used quality measures. Programs contribute more to formal employment and wages when they are longer, have been provided for a longer time, are taught by more specialized institutions, and are offered in larger cities.

Keywords: short-cycle programs; value added; quality; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I23 I26 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-lma and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10262

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