Notes

practical training. They interact quite closely with the private sector and support students in their job search. The combination of these features might be a reason why graduation rates are higher at SCPs than bachelor’s programs, and why SCP graduates outperform bachelor’s dropouts in the labor market (chapter 1).

Nonetheless, there is substantial variation in program characteristics and practices. Further, programs seem to focus more on training quality than employment— perhaps believing that training quality alone will help students find good jobs. Students, however, might need more. For example, they might need assistance applying for jobs, training for interviews, and connecting with potential employers. This lack of focus on employment might a “blind spot” —not just for SCPs but also for students, who seem to value training quality above employment.

Can this blind spot be eliminated? Perhaps, if students start gaining access to employment information and start expecting good employment outcomes or if regulation and funding provide the institutions greater incentives to focus on those outcomes. Rethinking their activities, particularly those related to graduates’ labor market outcomes, seems to be a pressing need for these programs.

Notes

For their excellent research assistance, Andrea Franco, Manuela Granda, Angelica Sánchez, and Gabriel Suárez are gratefully acknowledged.

1. For the United States, Cellini (2009, 2010) finds that an increase in community college funding lowers enrollment at for-profit HEIs. Grosz (2019) finds that community college responses to local employment changes seem to operate through student demand rather than HEIs’ supply. For Colombia, Carranza and Ferreyra (2019) find that HEIs are more likely to open bachelor’s programs in markets that are larger, where they face less competition and there is a greater number of students similar to those served by the HEI, and in fields in which the HEI already has programs. 2. This section draws from the background paper by Carranza, Ferreyra, Gazmuri, and

Franco (2021), written for this book. 3. In Chile, the first public HEIs for SCPs opened in 2018. As of 2018, they captured only 0.02 percent of SCP enrollment. Source: Ministry of Education of Chile. 4. For Colombia, the analysis does not study entry on the part of SENA. This is because

SENA’s decisions are made by the Ministry of Labor, on which SENA depends, based on policy-related considerations. 5. Although these locations might seem too large to represent local markets, they are actually reasonable. Most local markets correspond to metropolitan areas, and many students from the department (or region) who do not live in a metropolitan area actually travel there to take classes. Thus, in practice, the local market is indeed the whole department (or region). 6. The results reported here are based on partial coefficients from regressions that control for other regressors, including department, field, and year fixed effects.

See Carranza et al. (2021) for further details. 7. These findings are similar to those for bachelor’s programs exclusively in Carranza and

Ferreyra (2019), described in Ferreyra et al. (2017).