Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility
- Autores: María Angelica Bautista, Felipe González, Luis R. Martínez, Pablo Muñoz, Mounu Prem
- Localización: Documentos de Trabajo ( Instituto de Economía PUC ), ISSN-e 0717-7593, Nº. 542, 2020, págs. 1-49
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
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.
