The Fast Track to New Skills: Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

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Entry and Competition in the Market for Short-Cycle Programs

“…In order to explore whether exit is related to negative selection, we use measures of program alue-added in terms of wages and employment constructed for a subset of programs. These value-added measures are constructed using individual-level OLE employment data from 2010 to 2013; they are estimated as the program fixed-effect on wages (or employment) after controlling for individual characteristics (see Ferreyra et al, 2021). We then aggregate individual program decisions at the institution-field-department-year level to study the relationship between entry and exit decisions within an HEI.…”

“…These programs, which last two or three years, are shorter than bachelor's programs, have a clear labor market focus, and are typically oriented towards specific occupations. They capture about a quarter of higher education students worldwide (Ferreyra et al, 2021) and a third in the US, where they are mostly taught at community colleges. They are the preferred choice of students who lack the time, resources, or academic readiness to pursue a bachelor's program, and also of those who might already have a bachelor's degree but seek additional skills in the same field or a different one.…”

“…With an SCP enrollment share in higher education of 31 percent, Colombia is an exception in the region and thereby yields the opportunity to study industry dynamics. As in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, traditional bachelor's programs in Colombia are longer (theoretically lasting five or six years) and costlier, on average, than SCPs, with significant dispersion in net returns and low completion rates (Ferreyra et al, 2017(Ferreyra et al, , 2021. Perhaps for this reason, over the last fifteen years there has been a large expansion in the number of SCPs offered in Colombia, particularly in metropolitan areas.…”

What makes a Program Good? Evidence from Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…In Latin America and the Caribbean, the higher education enrollment rate has more than doubled since the early 2000s, reaching 52 percent in 2017. Although all countries in the region have experienced remarkable growth in higher education (Ferreyra et al, 2021), they still face the challenge of expanding their systems while improving quality and satisfying the skill needs of the economy.…”

“…Despite the promise of SCPs, Ferreyra et al (2021) show that these programs also have some shortcomings. In particular, student academic and labor market outcomes vary greatly among programs.…”