by Dean Karlan
Anthony was not the only child in his family, but he was the eldest—and, for the moment, the only one destined for SSS and beyond. His parents knew they did not have the money to send all their children to school beyond JSS (Junior Secondary School), so they pooled their limited resources and invested in him. His siblings’ sacrifice meant that Anthony could continue on, at least for a while. For their part, the parents reasoned that the younger kids weren’t dropping out for good; rather, once Anthony finished college and got a job befitting a graduate, he would earn enough to send his brothers and sisters back to school.
The family had recently made a heroic push, scraping and saving to pay the SSS exam fees, and now there was nothing left. High scores on the SSS exam could potentially lead to a scholarship to a tertiary institution, but first he had to apply. Each application carried a $40 fee. That’s where Jake came in.
How could he refuse? If $40 (or $80, or $120) was really the missing link in a chain that would pull Anthony and his siblings up the educational ladder, then surely it was a worthwhile expense. But, like any good donor, Jake had some questions. First and foremost was: Where do you want to go for college, and why?
Jake hoped this would be a good conversation starter, but it stopped Anthony dead in his tracks. For a moment his smile fell and he looked out at the rain, still sloshing down in buckets, still deafening. Then he recovered himself and reeled off the names of three prominent institutions: a liberal arts university, an engineering polytechnic, and a college that trained teachers. He said, “I want to attend university so I can get my degree. That way I will develop myself and find better work.”
“But those places you named are all very different. One trains teachers and another trains scientists. What is it you want to study? And what kind of work do you want to do in the future?”
“By all means, I will study geography. As for the work, I can be in a company. I would be a manager.”
“A manager of what?”
“Oh, any kind of company will be fine. Or a bank.”
It was becoming clear that Anthony didn’t know exactly what he wanted. The trickiest part, it seemed, was right in front of him. Anthony didn’t have a good sense of what tertiary education was about—of what one puts in and what one gets in return. Specifically, he never talked about acquiring expertise or skills that would ultimately find application in a job. But he spoke with great reverence about the college degree (any college degree) as if it were a very powerful talisman that would automatically confer wealth and prestige on its owner. His smile came back whenever he talked about it. The particulars—subject matter, educational institution, future employer—faded away. The value of higher education, it seemed, resided wholly in gaining access to the mysterious power of the degree. It was not something he had ever thought to question.
That’s not a strike against him; of course, the same is true of millions of high school graduates headed off to college, both in the United States and beyond. Many of us (Jake and me included) didn’t settle on a specific career path before we finished high school. We pursued college degrees because we knew they were good to have, even if we were not sure exactly how we would use them. When we got to university we tried new things, stumbled on an interesting field of study, fell into a job—our paths were improvised and meandering. But it seemed that, with so much of his family’s resources invested in his education, so much of their future hanging in the balance, and so minimal a cushion for mistakes, Anthony might have done well to have some kind of strategy.
So Jake pressed him on it, little by little. He tried working through it backward: Start with a realistic goal (“to get a job in a bank”) and identify the best way to achieve it (study business, finance, or accounting at a four-year university). He tried working through it forward: Start with what you like to do (“play soccer”), now try again (“help my brother with his maths”), and see where you might end up if you followed that path (teaching math at a primary or secondary school).
At no time that afternoon were the contours of Anthony’s future revealed in a flash, but he allowed that he had never thought about things in this way before. He was slowly edging toward a plan.
They had been talking for nearly an hour. It was getting late, and although they had stood under the balcony the whole time, they were both wet. Slowly but surely, the splatter from a gutter’s gushing downspout had doused them. Anthony said he had to return to the trotro station so he wouldn’t miss the last van heading north. His big, darting eyes looked out through the rain and down the street coursing with muddy water, all bound for the bottom of the hill and the impossible bog of the station. Jake asked whether he had plans to return to Accra, so that they could talk more and decide how to proceed.
“Talk more?” he asked. “I thought you would help me with the application fees.”
“But where are you going to send the applications? Have you already decided after our conversation?”
Here was the smile and the confidence; this was a question he was ready for. “Yes. I will send them to the three”—and here he reeled off the same three names again—“as I said before. So the cost is three times forty, or one twenty.”
Jake was crestfallen. “But what about all we talked about? About planning a course of study and planning how it will lead toward a specific job?”
“Oh, by all means Mister Jacob, it will, it will.” Smiling, waving his hands. “Anyway I didn’t know we were talking about this very application period. I thought it was all in future. But please, Mister Jacob, the application is now, so I’m sure I can count on you?”
Anthony was probably not satisfied walking back through the rain with a measly fifteen dollars to cover his travel and food; and fortunately the story does not end here. We will see Anthony again soon. But we have heard enough already to open a window on one of the most pressing and pervasive problems with education for the poor.
Step One: Adding Students
Honestly, we can’t claim to understand exactly how education—real learning—arises. But we do know some things about it. We’ll start with the obvious: In schools, education is something that happens between teachers and students. We can be confident about that much. But although students are an essential ingredient in the recipe, at least 115 million school-age children around the world aren’t in school. Why not?
One explanation is price: It’s just too expensive to send them. In some countries, the government does not provide any free public schooling, even at the primary level, and in these cases the cost of private school tuition alone puts education out of reach for many. But there are fewer and fewer such countries, and they account for only a fraction of missing education worldwide. Much of the problem is in countries where education is readily available—at least in theory. Ghana, for instance, technically provides free public education all the way through the end of SSS (equivalent to high school). So why should Anthony’s parents be unable to afford secondary education for their children?
The answer, which is by no means unique to Ghana, is that even free schooling isn’t completely free. First, there is the opportunity cost of education—that is, the money a student could be earning were he not in the classroom. And there are plenty of regular, explicit costs too. Students need to provide their own uniforms, notebooks, textbooks, pens and pencils, lunch money, and bus fare. Then there are PTA fees, additional charges for exam preparation (even, in the Ghanaian case, when it is conducted during regular school hours), and registration fees for nationwide standardized tests like Anthony’s SSS exams.
The burden of these ancillary costs is enough to keep many poor children out of school. This is a dark cloud, but it has a silver lining. It implies that the will and desire for education is already there. Parents might not send their kids to school for lack of resources, but they would if they could. On its own, that’s little more than cold comfort; fortunately, it also points the way to a solution. If people want education but can’t afford it, development programs could
help bring more students in just by making it cheaper.
The other good news is that we can do more than speculate. Dozens of programs around the world aim to get more kids into classrooms by lowering the costs associated with schooling, and a number of them have been rigorously evaluated. These run the gamut of scale and complexity, from programs distributing single uniforms to pupils all the way up to nationwide initiatives with crossovers into public health. Let’s look at a few.
Clothes Make the Student
Michael Kremer, the Harvard economist who conceived the space shuttle theory of development we saw in the last chapter, remains convinced that the basics really matter. The O-rings have to work. He and two students, David Evans and Muthoni Ngatia, suspected that simple things—uniforms, textbooks, notebooks, and the like—were the missing link. Maybe students who didn’t have these materials were embarrassed to come to school. They proposed to test a simple solution with an RCT. They would give out uniforms for free to some students, and see whether their attendance improved.
They partnered with ICS Africa (the same organization that had worked on the Savings and Fertilizer Initiative we saw in the last chapter), which ran a sponsorship program for primary school students in western Kenya. The program used some of its donors’ money to buy one uniform per year for sponsored students and to pay for some schoolwide benefits—a grant for classroom construction and books, several visits per year from a pair of trained nurses, and instruction from an agricultural representative who organized student clubs to grow crops on school grounds. The schoolwide benefits were made available equally to all students, not just those who received sponsorships.
Twelve primary schools were chosen to participate in the RCT, and there were enough sponsorships to cover about half of the students. Recipients were chosen: First, students who had lost one or more parents were identified and selected; then the remaining sponsorships were allocated by lottery. Field officers made unannounced visits to the school to track the attendance of both sponsored and unsponsored children. They also monitored all students’ performance on annual standardized tests.
Over the course of three years under the program, those who had received uniforms from ICS came to school more than their classmates who hadn’t. At the beginning of the program, the absence rate hovered around 18 percent—so most students had been missing about one day of school per week. Based on the tracking data, the researchers found that receiving a uniform cut that number by 7 percentage points—more than a third.
Breaking down the students into subgroups, they saw another striking result. Among those receiving uniforms from ICS, the gains in attendance were concentrated around students who did not own even a single uniform when the program began. These students’ absence rate dropped by 13 percentage points—more than two-thirds!—while the change in attendance for students who had at least one uniform at the outset was small and statistically indistinguishable from zero.
It looked like the researchers’ initial suspicion was right. Providing one uniform to a student who had none made a big difference, but giving an additional uniform to a student who already had at least one did not.
Kremer’s team and ICS had hit on a commonsense solution—one that many of the students’ mothers surely would have applied themselves, if they had had the means. They recognized that kids were embarrassed to go to a school where they stood out, and helped them feel more comfortable. To use Kremer’s space shuttle analogy, providing uniforms to students who had none ensured that one of the many O-rings on the line to education held its seal.
Cutting Checks
Providing free uniforms is one way to get kids into classrooms, but it is certainly not the only way—and it may not be the best. What we really want to know is, for each dollar spent, what approach gives us the biggest education gains? We cannot evaluate a single idea and go home. At the end of day we have to choose between many seemingly good ideas. And that’s where the uniform result gets turned inside out.
Another approach to making education cheaper is to do so directly, by paying people in return for going to school. Programs like these are called “conditional cash transfers,” because they consist of direct payments to participants, conditional on their behavior. One success story of poverty alleviation through education is Mexico’s Progresa program (now called Oportunidades), a government-run conditional cash transfer program that pays poor mothers if their children maintain a minimum of 85 percent attendance at school.
When it was begun in 1997, Progresa was one of the largest and most ambitious programs of its kind ever attempted. It came with a hefty price tag, and the government wanted to know just how much good it was doing with all that money. So they partnered with economists and designed an RCT to measure impacts on education and integrated it seamlessly with the phase-in of the program. In fact, the design turned a budget constraint into an advantage: At the outset there wasn’t enough money to launch Progresa in all 495 targeted communities, so they randomly selected two-thirds of communities to receive the program right away, and monitored the rest as a control group for a two-year period. At the end of that time, when funds were available, Progresa was implemented in the control communities. Thus, they were able to perform a rigorous evaluation without excluding anyone they wished to help.
Paul Schultz, an economist at Yale University, crunched the numbers on Progresa’s impact on school enrollment. It had been a home run. As expected, eligible students in participating communities were significantly less likely to drop out. The decrease in dropouts was spread across grade levels, but was concentrated where it needed to be—among secondary school students, who had had the highest dropout rates prior to the program.
Demonstrating effectiveness on such a large scale also caught people’s attention. The Mexican government was rightfully applauded for having had the foresight to integrate an evaluation into its launch. More important, countries around the world started following Mexico’s example. Today, thanks largely to Progresa, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Turkey, and a number of other countries are delivering similar conditional cash transfer programs to millions of families.
From Good to Better
The Subsidios program in Bogotá, Colombia, is one of Progresa’s descendants. In the initial planning phase, the government had imagined a program that closely followed the Mexican example: Eligible families would receive monthly transfers if their children maintained 80 percent attendance or better. They also took a cue from Mexico’s success and engaged a team of economists—Felipe Barrera-Osorio of the World Bank, Marianne Bertrand of the Chicago Graduate School of Business, Leigh Linden of Columbia University and IPA, and Francisco Pérez-Calle of G|Exponential—to design an evaluation.
The economists saw an opportunity to make a good idea even better. They suggested that the government of Bogotá test out two tweaks that might improve the program’s effectiveness without greatly increasing its price. The first variation was simply a change in timing: Instead of collecting the full payment each month, a third of the money would be held in a savings account, payable at the time of year when students reenrolled in school. The second variation actually changed the structure and conditions of payment. As in the first, eligible families received two-thirds of the regular amount each month, but in this variation they received a large bonus if the student graduated. If, after graduation, she matriculated immediately to a tertiary institution, they could collect the bonus early; if she didn’t matriculate, they had to wait an additional year before collecting it.
Both of these variations come straight out of behavioral economics. They recognize that people do not make choices based solely on the dollar value of incentives, but that timing matters too. Think back to Vijaya, the flower seller we met in chapter 7, whose pocket money was never safe from her husband’s unquenchable thirst. A standard Progresa-style conditional cash transfer program might not have served her family very well (though her drunkard husband probably would have liked those big mont
hly checks), but timing tweaks like these could have made a big difference.
The timing of the lump-sum bonus payment to coincide with students’ reenrollment period was also a potential plus. It lightens the burden of the out-of-pocket expenses necessary at the beginning of a school year, and so increases the likelihood that families will make those essential purchases. Just think how much easier back-to-school shopping seems when you’ve just cashed a big check.
The researchers rolled the basic program with the first variations into a single RCT so they could be compared side by side, and conducted a second RCT to evaluate the second variation. They tracked both attendance and enrollment for about thirteen thousand students: eight thousand who had each been randomly assigned to one of the three treatments (the standard program and the two variations), and five thousand who were monitored as a control group. After a year of observation it was clear that, on the whole, the incentive approach worked, as it had in Mexico. Students eligible for the treatments had about 12 to 26 percent fewer absences than their counterparts in the control group.
There was also evidence that the variations worked better than the standard conditional cash transfer program—that Bogotá had indeed found ways to improve on the successful Progresa model. Specifically, both variations had bigger impacts on matriculation rates than the basic Progresa-style program. It turned out that students eligible for the basic treatment were no more likely to enroll for the following year than control students, while those receiving the variations were significantly more likely to do so. What’s more, the vast majority of the increase in year-to-year matriculation was driven by students who were predicted most likely to drop out. That means the incentives were reaching the people who needed them most.