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Barriers to skill acquisition in Brazil: Public and private school students performance in a public university entrance exam

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  • Cavalcanti, Tiago
  • Guimaraes, Juliana
  • Sampaio, Breno

Abstract

This paper uses a novel data set to quantify the difference in performance of public and private school students in an entrance test exam of the major public university in Brazilian Northeast (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE). Although there are many public universities in Brazil, from our knowledge, there is no study that uses data on entrance test scores at such universities to evaluate the determinants of students' performance and the barriers for public school students to get in the good universities. The data set has detailed information on individual and school characteristics, and family background. We found that test scores of public school students are on average about 4.2-17% lower than those taken by private school students, depending on the set of controls. This result is robust when we address problems related to attrition, omitted variables (e.g., cognitive ability), and unobservable selectivity. We also show that once students get into the university, those from public schools perform as well as those from private schools. In addition, the proportion of public school students that gets into the university is roughly the same as the proportion of students doing the entrance exam. However, there is a strong barrier for public school students to get into high competitive majors. The fraction of students from public schools that gets into high competitive majors such as law, medicine, and electronic engineering is almost null. Our findings provide quantitative evidence to the common view that the Brazilian elitist high education system is an important channel for inequality persistence.

Suggested Citation

  • Cavalcanti, Tiago & Guimaraes, Juliana & Sampaio, Breno, 2010. "Barriers to skill acquisition in Brazil: Public and private school students performance in a public university entrance exam," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 395-407, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:50:y:2010:i:4:p:395-407
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    Cited by:

    1. Ozkan Eren & Serkan Ozbeklik, 2015. "Leadership Activities and Future Earnings: Is There a Causal Relation?," Journal of Human Capital, University of Chicago Press, vol. 9(1), pages 45-63.
    2. repec:ebl:ecbull:eb-17-00562 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Joseph Deutsch & Jacques Silber, 2011. "An ordinal approach to the study of intergenerational opportunities for standard of living: the case of Latin America," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(4), pages 579-604, December.
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    5. Camila Rafaela Alvarenga & Joanna Georgios Alexopoulos, 2018. "The Effects Of Governmental Incentives On Higher Education Choice: A Theoretical Model," Anais do XLIV Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 44th Brazilian Economics Meeting] 218, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    6. González, Felipe & Miguel, Edward, 2015. "War and local collective action in Sierra Leone: A comment on the use of coefficient stability approaches," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 30-33.

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