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 3

Comparison of simple statistical measurements for the whole population, SISBEN population, and non-SISBEN population. (a) Mean of the examination score for years from 2014 to 2017. From this figure, the reader may observe a strong trend in the increase of the examination scores of the SISBEN students. Meanwhile, we observe a small decrease of the average non-SISBEN scores during the period. It is also important to note that the behavior of the whole population is dominated mainly by the SISBEN students. (b) Behavior of the standard deviation of the scores for the SISBEN, the non-SISBEN, and the whole population for the years from 2014 to 2017. It is important to note that, for the final year, the standard deviation of the scores of the SISBEN graduates suffers an important reduction, suggesting an improvement in the performance in the examination. In contrast, for the year 2017, non-SISBEN graduates showed a difference in the examination scores. (c) Fraction of the entire population that belongs to the SISBEN and non-SISBEN population taking the exam, respectively. The system behavior is mainly dominated by the SISBEN population, as the reader may note that, for the year 2017, more than 80% of the population declared being beneficiaries of SISBEN, which may be considered as an important aspect to analyze in future work.

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