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Changes in financial aid policies raise questions about students being asked to pay too much for college and whether parents' college savings for their children helps reduce the burden on students to pay for college. Using trivariate probit analysis with predicted probabilities, in this exploratory study we find recent changes in the financial aid system place a higher responsibility on African American, Latino/Hispanic, and moderate-income students to pay for college themselves. We also find when parents open a savings account, start a state-sponsored savings plan, or open a college investment fund students are less likely to pay for college with student contributions. Therefore, we suggest in addition to grants and scholarships, policies that encourage accumulation of savings for college among minority and lower income families may help reduce the college cost burden they experience.

We evaluate how far away six Latin American countries stand from a normative goal of equality of opportunity for educational achievement in [OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment] PISA 2006-2009. We work with alternative characterization of types: gender, school type (public or private), parental education, and their combinations. Following Checchi-Peragine's (2010) non-parametric method, we find that inequality of opportunity for educational achievement in Latin America ranges from less than one per cent to up to 25 per cent, depending on the year, the country, the subject and the specification of circumstances. The magnitudes are substantial with respect to what is found in comparator countries. Parental education and school type prove to be important sources of inequality of opportunity, contrary to gender. By means of sensitivity analyses, while most results show small to moderate variation in terms of magnitudes, in ordinary terms (rankings) they remain quite stable. Brazil stands out as the most opportunity unequal country of the sample.

This paper contributes to research on affirmative action by examining issues of equity in the context of racial quotas in Brazil. We study the experience of the University of Brasilia, which established racial quotas in 2004 reserving 20 per cent of available admissions slots for students who self-identified as black. Based on university admissions data and a student survey conducted by the authors, we find evidence that race, socioeconomic status, and gender were considerable barriers to college attendance and achievement. For example, first-difference regressions involving pairs of siblings indicate that black identity and gender had a negative effect on entrance exam scores. Moreover, we compare displaced and displacing applicants and find that racial quotas helped promote equity to some extent. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of redistribution were highly limited, and the vast majority of Brazilians had little chance of attending college, suggesting that more still needs to be done.

Governments introducing output parameters (e.g. graduation numbers) in the funding rule of universities believe that it will induce universities to raise their teaching efforts while educational standards will remain unaffected. In this article we first show on theoretical grounds that this desire can only be fulfilled if there exist positive interaction effects between student ability, student effort and teaching effort in the educational production function. Secondly, even if this is the case we argue that universities attracting more students with a vulnerable socioeconomic background will not be rewarded for raising their teaching effort in the same way as other universities. Empirical data on success rates of Flemish university students reveal indeed a strong correlation between students' probabilities of success and socioeconomic background. Moreover, we find a strong social clustering within universities.

This paper measures and decomposes socioeconomic-related inequality in mathematics achievement in 15 European Union (EU) member states. Data is taken from the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). There is socioeconomic-related inequality in mathematics achievement, favoring the higher socioeconomic groups in each country. There are important differences among countries. The inequality is higher in Germany, Greece, Great Britain, Belgium, and Portugal and is lower in Sweden and Finland. Socioeconomic factors represent between 14.9 per cent and 34.6 per cent of the overall inequality in education. The decomposition exercises add important insights for policy. Despite the differences, EU-15 member states can be categorized into two main groups. The first includes the Nordic countries plus Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece, where socioeconomic-related inequality appears to be explained mainly by the students’ background characteristics. In Portugal and, to a lesser extent, in Spain the high contribution of socioeconomic background is mainly due to the prevalence of high socioeconomic inequality and socioeconomic concentration of educational resources. The second group includes Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and France. In these countries, the high impact of schools’ composition on individual achievement is the main driver of the studied inequality. Differences between countries are also explored.