Equity and Higher Education Access in Chile: The High School Ranking Admission Policy Results from the Perspective of Its Program Theory
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Date
2024
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Abstract
The High School Ranking (HSR) is an equity admission policy aimed at increasing the enrollment of high-performing students from disadvantaged educational contexts in selective universities in Chile. We evaluate the degree to which the HSR program theory holds by exploring expectations, motivations, and college applications of students from low-performing schools. Using a survey (N = 1.831) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), we explore how high school students from low-academic contexts compare to peers from more advantageous settings regarding expectations and academic motivation associated with the HSR policy. Also, using regression discontinuity design (RDD), we analyze whether the reception of the HSR bonus raises the application rates of high-performing students from disadvantaged educational contexts. Our results show that although students from low-performing schools have higher expectations associated with HSR, they have lower levels of academic motivation and perform fewer actions to improve their HSR compared to their pairs from more advantageous school settings. Also, the HSR score bonus is not associated with improving college application rates of high-performing students from low-performing high schools. These results expand previous evidence on HSR using a comprehensive design that unveils the connection between socioeconomic and motivational variables in students’ behaviors, challenging the assumptions of a higher education equity initiative.
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Keywords
College admission, High school ranking, Higher education access, Program theory