Three essays on the economics of education
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation encompasses three chapters that study the Brazilian higher educational system and determines the barriers to acquiring higher education in the country. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Rural and urban schools' performance in Brazil and its impact on access to higher education Recent research on academic achievement in Brazil shows that public school students face strong barriers in gaining access to higher education compared to private school students. However, little is known about differences between public schools located in urban and rural areas, another source of opportunity inequality. I estimate the effectiveness of rural and urban schools in Brazil using data from a major university entrance exam. To account for bias in Ordinary Least Square (OLS), I use a technique recently developed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005b) that estimates the ratio of the influence of omitted variables relative to observed variables that would be required to completely explain the estimates one obtains via OLS. The results indicate that students from urban areas outperform their rural counterparts and provide suggestive evidence that the poor quality of rural public schools is the source of such score differences. Chapter 2: Climbing the Educational Ladder: The Relative Performance of Rural and Urban Students in Brazilian Universities Recent research on academic achievement in Brazil shows that rural school students face strong barriers in gaining access to higher education compared to urban school students. However, little is known about differences between rural and urban students when they are granted access to the university. We estimate the relative performance of rural and urban students in Brazil using data from a major university. Furthermore, to observe how performance varies along the different GPA quantiles, we use Koenker and Bassett (1978) quantile regression approach. The results indicate that students from rural ar…
abstract: This dissertation encompasses three chapters that study the Brazilian higher educational system and determines the barriers to acquiring higher education in the country. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Rural and urban schools' performance in Brazil and its impact on access to higher education Recent research on academic achievement in Brazil shows that public school students face strong barriers in gaining access to higher education compared to private school students. However, little is known about differences between public schools located in urban and rural areas, another source of opportunity inequality. I estimate the effectiveness of rural and urban schools in Brazil using data from a major university entrance exam. To account for bias in Ordinary Least Square (OLS), I use a technique recently developed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005b) that estimates the ratio of the influence of omitted variables relative to observed variables that would be required to completely explain the estimates one obtains via OLS. The results indicate that students from urban areas outperform their rural counterparts and provide suggestive evidence that the poor quality of rural public schools is the source of such score differences. Chapter 2: Climbing the Educational Ladder: The Relative Performance of Rural and Urban Students in Brazilian Universities Recent research on academic achievement in Brazil shows that rural school students face strong barriers in gaining access to higher education compared to urban school students. However, little is known about differences between rural and urban students when they are granted access to the university. We estimate the relative performance of rural and urban students in Brazil using data from a major university. Furthermore, to observe how performance varies along the different GPA quantiles, we use Koenker and Bassett (1978) quantile regression approach. The results indicate that students from rural ar…
author: Sampaio, Gustavo
language: en
keywords: education quality, Brazil, higher education, ability, evasion
date published: 2012-09-18T21:05:46Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:30Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/34204