Do inclusive education policies improve employment opportunities?: evidence from a field experiment

• Autores: Monge Agüero, Jorge, Galarza, Francisco, Yamada Fukusaki, Gustavo
• Formato: documento de trabajo
• Fecha de Publicación: 2020
• Institución: Universidad del Pacífico
• Repositorio: UP-Institucional
• Lenguaje: inglés
• OAI Identifier: oai:repositorio.up.edu.pe:11354/3104
• Enlace del recurso: https://hdl.handle.net/11354/3104
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: Programa Nacional Beca 18 (Perú); Educación superior--Perú; Educación inclusiva--Perú; Discriminación en el trabajo--Perú; Mercado laboral--Perú; Egresados universitarios--Trabajo--Perú; https://purl.org/pe-repo/ocde/ford#5.03.01; https://purl.org/pe-repo/ocde/ford#5.02.01

In labor markets where disadvantaged students are discriminated against, merit-based college scholarships targeting these students could convey two opposing signals to employers. There is a positive signal reflecting the candidate’s cognitive ability (talented in high-school and able to maintain a high GPA in college) as well as her soft skills (overcoming poverty). There is also a possible negative signal as the targeting of the scholarship indicates that the beneficiary comes from a disadvantaged household. We conduct a correspondence study to analyze the labor market impact of an inclusive education program. Beca 18 provides merit-based scholarships to talented poor students admitted to 3-year and 5-year colleges in Peru. We find that the positive signal dominates. Including information of being a scholarship recipient increases the likelihood of getting a callback for a job interview by 20%. However, the effect is much smaller in jobs and careers where the poor are under-represented, suggesting that the negative signal of the scholarship is not zero.