Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: Jorge Luis Teixeira Ávila

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : Jorge Luis Teixeira Ávila
DATE: 25/08/2023
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Vídeo Conferência
TITLE:

Student Financing and Access to Higher Education: an evaluation of FIES

KEY WORDS:

Student loans, higher education, higher education institutions, forprofit HEIs, FIES

PAGES: 112
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Economia
SUMMARY:

In the first paper, we examine the impact of FIES, the primary funding program for postsecondary education in Brazil, on college access and completion. Our identification strategy relies on a reform that implemented regional quotas for annual loan allocations, enabling a comparison of regions that were differently affected. These quotas are determined discontinuously according to weights assigned for ranges of regional Human Development Index (HDI) values. We find that each additional loan leads to approximately 0.17 additional college graduates in six years. However, the effects are quite heterogeneous, and concentrated mostly in evening programs, in non-profit higher education institutions (HEIs), and students that graduated from public high schools. We also observe that for-profit HEIs respond to increased government funding by reducing their own grants. Such behavior is not observed for non-profit institutions. Thus, our analysis indicates that financial constraints and crowding out of other funding sources are important causes of heterogeneity in the effects of student loans programs. In the second paper, we investigate how for-profit higher education institutions (HEIs) respond to the availability of government funding in the form of student loans, by using a similar identification strategy as in the first paper. We find that increased loan availability results in a significant boost in revenue for such institutions, of about $0.86 for each additional $1 in loan disbursements by the federal government. Each \$1 increase in revenue results in a $0.38 increase in earnings, with the remainder resulting in increased expenses, especially in laborrelated costs (+$0.31). Markup estimates are quite high on average (66%), and are higher for higher quality HEIs, less selective HEIs and HEIs that do not face competition of public universities. Nevertheless, we observe that institutions also take advantage of this revenue shock to improve quality standards by hiring more permanent and full-time faculty with better credentials (master and doctoral degrees). Oversight of higher education programs by the Ministry of Education seems to have a role in this behavior, since spending increases in areas included in annual quality assessments, resulting in higher quality scores for the institution.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interna - 1546818 - ANA CAROLINA PEREIRA ZOGHBI
Interno - 2003700 - MICHAEL CHRISTIAN LEHMANN
Presidente - 1981130 - RAFAEL TERRA DE MENEZES