The Impact of Public and Private Job Training in Colombia

Abstract

1The authors present various matching estimators of the impact on earnings for individuals who attended public and private job training programs in Colombia. The authors estimate propensity scores by controlling for the wide variety of personal and socioeconomic background variables of those individuals. The effect of training, measured by the mean impact of the treatment on the treated, shows that: (i) for youths, no institution has a significant impact in the short or long run except private institutions for males; the scope of the data, however, limits the reliability of the result; (ii) for adult males, neither SENA nor the other public institutions have a significant impact in the short or long run; (iii) for SENAtrained adult females there are positive but not significant impacts in the short run and greater and close to significant effects in the long run. All other public institutions have a higher impact that is significant in the long-run; (iv) for adults trained at private institutions there are large and significant effects in both the short and long run, but for adult males in the short run the effects are smaller and only barely significant. In addition, neither short nor long courses provided by SENA seem to have a significant impact on earnings. In general, females benefit more from both short and long courses than males. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis shows that under the assumption of direct unitary costs equal to SENA, private institutions are more profitable than public institutions, which are in turn more profitable than SENA.

Active Labour Market Programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis

“…Some examples of this trend are ProJoven in Peru (Ñopo et al, 2007) and the Opción Joven and Pro-Joven programmes in Uruguay (Naranjo Silva, 2002). In addition, programmes undertaken in collaboration with private institutions, as well as training schemes where providers are selected through a bidding process, are found to have a greater impact on employability than those that do not include these elements (Medina and Núñez, 2005;Chong and Galdo, 2006). One explanation for this could be that communication and social dialogue with the private sector allows training providers to improve the relevance and quality of the training offered and, therefore, to develop workers' skills to match the requirements of employers.…”

Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: A Long-Term Follow-Up

“…On the other hand, we have no long-term information on how those not working in the informal sector are faring and this precludes a complete evaluation of the program. 1 See Gaviria Uribe and Núñez Mendez (2003); Barrera-Osorio and Corchuelo (2003); Medina and Núñez (2005); Sarmiento et al (2007); Santa María et al (2009);and Steiner, Rojas, and Millán (2010), among others, for issues relating to training in Colombia. According to Székely Pardo (2012), 20 percent of Colombian youths 15-18 years old were not in education, employment, or training by 2005, while Guarín and Medina (2015) show that in Colombian cities like Medellín, the same figure is as high as 44 percent for youth 16-20 years old.…”

The Returns from Training in Colombia: Evidence from a Longitudinal Survey

“…These results show that women's wages increased by 19.6% and that the probability of having a paid employment was 6.8pp higher among trainees 6 . Medina and Nuñez (2005) explored returns from vocational training or from attending short courses offered by SENA. Using matching estimators, the study does not find evidence of any significant effect of short courses on wages.…”