Better together? Student's benefits of educational market integration

Abstract

Educational market integration have become a common practice in various countries, changing potentially student's application and enrollment behavior. We implement a difference-indifference estimation exploiting student's geographic exposure to market integration in Chile to understand student's gain and losses from this process. Using administrative data, we show that the market integration process has no effect on overall university enrollment but changes the enrollment composition: new platform institutions increased enrollment and old ones decreased. The reduction in application costs and the release of additional information, particularly historical cutoff data, seem to play a more significant role in shaping these dynamics than the congestion reduction. Heterogeneity analysis shows that low-income students enrollment increase, reflecting application barriers to decentralized admission institutions and implying gains in equity and efficiency of the system.