Taking a punt on vouchers Colombia-style

A Colombian scheme, which in its first 10 years provided more than 125,000 poor pupils with vouchers to cover about half the cost of private secondary school, allocates vouchers by lottery.

Results from the programme, which started in 1991, show lottery winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school, had completed 0.1 more years of schooling and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades, according to a US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report.

Lottery winners worked less, so that on balance lottery-winning households actually devoted more resources to education than the voucher face value, the NBER paper says. Vouchers were renewable as long as students maintained satisfactory academic performance. Figures show that about 77% of recipients renewed them compared to the national high school promotion rate of about 70%. The paper suggests increased learning came about not only through the incentive of retaining vouchers but also because students were able to choose private schools which were generally of higher quality than state schools.

The NBER report, Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment, was written by Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King and Michael Kremer. It can be accessed from the NBER website.