146
The Fast Track to New Skills
graduation, perhaps because programs with a higher reputation might charge higher tuition. Alternatively, higher tuition might provide resources to improve program quality—for instance, by hiring better trained faculty, upgrading infrastructure, or providing more student services, all of which might enhance skill formation and contribute to higher graduates’ wages. As with formal employment, there are mixed associations between wages and determinants related to engagement with industry. On the one hand, graduates from programs or institutions with an employment center have reported higher salaries than those from programs without this service, a result that is aligned with evidence that job search assistance improves employment outcomes.34 On the other hand, programs that have agreements with firms to hire their graduates report lower wages among their graduates. Those agreements might create a tradeoff: although the firms agree to hire the graduates, they do so at a lower wage.35 The association between the type of administration (public or private) and wages is not statistically significant when accounting for all the other determinants. However, the estimations show that most of the associations between the determinants and wages are driven by private HEIs (see figure 4B.4, in annex 4B). That is, although governance type (public or private) per se is not associated with wages, the relationship between the quality determinants and wages is different for public and private programs. So far, the chapter has reported findings using program-level data from the WBSCPS. In an ideal setting, the outcomes would be gauged from individuallevel administrative data. At the time of writing this report, Brazil was the only country for which data were accessible. Box 4.3 describes the use of these data to estimate the contributions of program characteristics and practices to student outcomes for Brazil. The estimates show that specific quality determinants— such as providing labor market information and receiving a high grade from the regulating authorities—as well as some characteristics, such as program size and HEI type, are associated with students’ academic and labor market outcomes.
Box 4.3 Quality Determinants and Value Added: The Case of Brazil As discussed in “Defining and Measuring SCP Quality,” a possible measure of program quality is value added to student outcomes. The estimation of value added requires detailed data at the individual level on all the elements that could affect student outcomes, to disentangle the contributions of all the inputs involved, including student background characteristics and ability, peer background and ability, and others. Such data were obtained for Brazil, specifically the states included in the World Bank ShortCycle Program Survey, São Paulo and Ceará. Data from several sources were merged: the Annual Reports of Social Information (Relação Anual de Informações Sociais, RAIS), a matched employer-employee data set of all workers and firms in the formal sector; the Higher box continues next page
