An Unintended Effect of Financing the University Education of the Most Brilliant and Poorest Colombian Students: The Case of the Intervention of the Ser Pilo Paga Program

Figure 1

Example of our approach based on studying the right tail of the score distributions. (a) Consider the right tail of two distributions (blue and red) at the “extreme-best” scores in the SABER 11 test for a particular examination year. Here, we may assume that these scores are distributed as a Pareto distribution of the form . In this example, and (clearly, ). This implies that students of the first population (blue) exhibit better performance in the test than the students of the second population (the red ones). Dashed lines are plotted for the eye. (b) Taking the parameter for the blue population for a time window of twelve years, we may study the evolution of the parameter through (1). In this figure, there is a nonmonotonous growing of the performance. (c) Considering the definition of in (2) and its continuous approximation in (3), we may study the evolution of the performance. In this context, improvement represents the rate in which performance changes in time. The reader may note that, in general, the measurement of performance will always be positive, but the improvement may not. This indicates that we may observe if a population obtained better results than the previous cohort or not.

(a)

(b)

(c)