Framework of the Book

The survey asked 65 questions covering a broad range of topics, including student demographics and readiness for the program; admission and graduation requirements; faculty characteristics, hiring, and evaluation; curriculum and practical training; infrastructure; online classes; costs and financing; oversight and regulation; institutional governance; interaction with industry; job search assistance; competition; and academic and labor market outcomes.

The WBSCPS has generated a wealth of information and allowed for characterizing the SCP sector well beyond what had been possible previously. The information is presented throughout the book.

Framework of the Book

To address the needs of individuals, employers, and policy makers, SCPs in LAC must be of high quality and respond flexibly to market needs. Hence, this study describes the SCP sector in LAC and investigates SCP outcomes, quality, and supply.

Just as SCPs have not received a great deal of policy attention in the past, neither have they received much research attention.6 Since the bulk of higher education research investigates bachelor’s programs, both in the developing and developed worlds, SCPs are an understudied segment of the higher education market. During the dissemination of previous work on higher education in LAC,7 focused mostly on bachelor’s programs, conversations with policy makers, business leaders, and higher education administrators and faculty revealed how important—and little known—the SCP segment is. This study seeks to fill that void. Further, the study makes a unique contribution to the SCP literature because of its geographic scope, data, and focus. While the best current research on SCPs for the developed world tends to focus on a single area within a country (for example, one state within the United States),8 this study focuses on multiple LAC countries. It exploits and combines rich data from several sources, including administrative data and the novel WBSCPS. And, while previous research has placed little focus on the heterogeneity across programs—particularly in practices—this study documents and examines SCPs’ variation across countries, higher education institution (HEI) types, fields, and subnational locations.

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 depicts the SCP landscape in LAC. It presents key stylized facts for SCPs in LAC relative to other regions and provides initial evidence of their academic and labor market promise. The chapter also describes SCP students, funding, and institutional arrangements.

Chapter 2 examines one dimension of the quality of SCPs, namely, their economic returns. The chapter examines multiple metrics: Mincerian returns, net lifetime returns, value-added contributions, and treatment effects. It also analyzes the demand for SCP graduates through the use of job vacancy data.

Chapter 3 investigates the supply side of the sector. It examines how institutions decide on the opening or closing of SCPs, how they compete with each other, and how SCP supply varies across locations of different sizes. Drawing