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  3. Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility

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Documento de trabajo

Chile’s Missing Students: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility

  • person Felipe González

    María Angélica Bautista; Luis R. Martínez; Pablo Muñoz; Mounu Prem

  • class Documento de Trabajo IE-PUC, N° 542, 2020

Abstract: Hostile policies towards higher education are a prominent feature of authoritarian regimes. We study the capture of higher education by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile following the 1973 coup. We find three main results: (i) cohorts that reached college age shortly after the coup experienced a large drop in college enrollment as a result of the systematic reduction in the number of openings for incoming students decreed by the regime; (ii) these cohorts had worse economic outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder, especially women; (iii) children with parents in the affected cohorts also have a substantially lower probability of college enrollment. These results demonstrate that the political capture of higher education in non-democracies hinders social mobility and leads to a persistent reduction in human capital accumulation, even after democratization.

Keywords: Dictatorship, higher education, social mobility, intergenerational transmission
JEL codes: I23, I24, I25, P51