Since 2015, I have been leading the experimental evaluation of a preferential college admission policy called PACE (Programa de Acceso a la Educación Superior) in Chile. My team includes economists in academia and government. We produce rigorous research, present our results to public policy stakeholders, and advise on policy design.

We are building large-scale datasets that will allow us to generate unique causal evidence on the impacts education access policies have on entire life trajectories.

I gratefully acknowledge funding from the ESRC and the Jacobs Foundation.

Reports

For the most up-to-date results, see our policy reports:

The impacts of preferential college admissions for the disadvantaged: experimental evidence from the PACE programme in Chile, (with R. Cooper, J. Guevara, J. Kinder, M. Rivera, A. Sanhueza), IFS WP W22/19, released by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2022.
Experimental evaluation of the impacts of the PACE policy on 2019 enrollments, (with R. Cooper, A. Sanhueza), released by the Chilean Ministry of Finance [in Spanish], 2020.
Impact Evaluation of the PACE policy (with R. Cooper, J. Guevara, M. Rivera, A. Sanhueza), released by Chilean Ministry of Finance and Chilean Ministry of Education [in Spanish], 2019.

Talks

I regularly give talks to help policymakers and practitioners make informed decisions on higher education policy:

September 2026: "Flexible pathways into higher education", Research to Policy Webinar, ENESET and DG-EAC European Commission
August 2026: "PACE program: what we learned and how to strengthen it", Undersecretary of Higher Education, Chilean Ministry of Education
May 2023: "Recommendations from the latest research findings on the PACE program", Undersecretary of Higher Education, Chilean Ministry of Education
April 2023: "Lessons from 8 years of studying the PACE program", maison FOCUS, Santiago, Chile
July 2022: "Evaluación de impacto del programa PACE", consortium of universities participating in the PACE program (the talk was attended by 160 practitioners and it was introduced by the Undersecretary of Higher Education, Veronica Figueroa Huencho)
July 2022: "PACE policy design", Undersecretary of Higher Education, Chilean Ministry of Education
June 2022: "PACE policy: current successes and future challenges", Research Centre, Chilean Ministry of Education
May 2019: "An evaluation of the PACE policy using a randomized experiment and a structural model”, Budget Office @ Chilean Ministry of Finance

Left: Presenting research findings to the Chilean Budget Office, May 2019 ; Right: Orientation class in a PACE school, June 2017

Left: a quote in a PACE school; top-right: data collection in July 2017, bottom-right: focus group in a PACE school with teachers, the school principal, and students in June 2017.

Presenting research findings to 160 university professionals who implement PACE in schools and universities, with an introduction by the then undersecretary of Higher Education, Veronica Figueroa Huencho, in July 2022.

With the FOCUS team collaborating on several data collections and focus groups in PACE schools since 2017, April 2023