Banca de DEFESA: Jorge Luis Teixeira Ávila

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : Jorge Luis Teixeira Ávila
DATE: 27/02/2024
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Vídeo Conferência
TITLE:

Student Financing and Higher Education: an evaluation of FIES

KEY WORDS:

student loans, higher education, higher education institutions, forprot HEIs, FIES

PAGES: 147
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Economia
SUMMARY:

This thesis consists of two papers that investigate the impact of FIES, the primary higher education nancing policy in Brazil, on access to college and on the behavior of higher education institutions. The identication strategy relies on a reform that implemented regional quotas for loans granted. These quotas depend on regional Human Development Index (HDI) values in a discontinuous way, allowing a quasi-experimental design that leverages both the policy change and the discontinuities introduced by the new allocation rule. In the rst paper, we nd that each additional loan leads to approximately 0.2 additional college graduates in six years. However, eects are quite heterogeneous, and concentrated mostly in for-prot higher education institutions (HEIs) and, notably, in evening programs. We nd that the impact of loans on initial enrollment is higher for more advantaged students, specically those coming from private high schools. Impact on graduation, on the other hand, is higher for students coming from public high schools, who are more likely to be nancially constrained. Further analysis suggests that less advantaged students increase their participation in the selection exam following an expansion in loan availability. However, they usually present lower scores, limiting their capacity to access loans in more competitive majors. Thus, despite highlighting the signicance of nancial constraints, our results also indicate that poor academic preparation seems to be an equality important obstacle to accessing higher education for students from less advantaged backgrounds. In the second paper, we investigate how for-prot higher education institutions (HEIs) respond to the availability of government funding. We nd that increased loan availability results in a signicant boost in revenue for such institutions, of $0.73-$0.78 for each additional $1 in loan disbursements by the federal government. Each $1 increase in revenue results in approximately a $0.4 increase in institutional prots, with the remainder resulting in increased expenses, especially in labor-related costs. Markup estimates are quite high on average (64%), and are higher for higher quality HEIs, less selective HEIs and HEIs that do not face competition of public universities. Nevertheless, we also nd indicative evidence that institutions take advantage of this revenue shock to improve quality standards by hiring permanent faculty with better credentials (master and doctoral degrees). Oversight of higher education programs 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

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