Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility

Felipe González, María Angélica Bautista,, Luis Martinez (), Pablo Muñoz and Mounu Prem

No 542, Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Abstract: Hostile policies towards higher education are a prominent feature of authoritarian regimes. We study the capture of higher education by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile following the 1973 coup. We find three main results: (i) cohorts that reached college age shortly after the coup experienced a large drop in college enrollment as a result of the systematic reduction in the number of openings for incoming students decreed by the regime; (ii) these cohorts had worse economic outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder, especially women; (iii) children with parents in the affected cohorts also have a substantially lower probability of college enrollment. These results demonstrate that the political capture of higher education in non-democracies hinders social mobility and leads to a persistent reduction in human capital accumulation, even after democratization.

Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility (2020)
Working Paper: Chile's Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility (2020)
Working Paper: Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility (2020)
Working Paper: Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility (2020)
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