Post-Secondary Education Access in Peru

Over the summer, I visited four public schools in Peru located in two regions, about 1,200 miles apart from each other. I interviewed teachers, principals and high school juniors and seniors. I wanted to discover their perspectives on perceived opportunities and barriers for students to plan for and fulfill their higher education goals. I also interviewed the superintendent at each school district to learn about local initiatives aimed at decreasing barriers to higher education transition.

I wanted to find out more about education as a driver for social mobility in a context in which higher education access is persistently unequal. Although Latin American countries have made remarkable progress in primary and secondary school enrollment, ensuring transition to and completion of higher education is an unfinished agenda. In Peru, while 56 percent of those from high-income households enroll in higher education, only 17 percent from the poorest households do. (National Household Survey ENAHO, 2024).

From my personal experience, I knew that low-income students face challenges that extend beyond the financial barrier of paying for college and related expenses. Since they are often the first in their families to attend higher education, they often don’t know people who have gone through the college-application process and the implicit rules of college-going compared to their higher-income peers. The disparities in access to this valuable support and guidance can influence the way young people make choices about their future. Having experienced the transition from high school to college as a first-generation college student has greatly shaped my interest in pursuing research in this field.

Schools can play a critical role in providing low-socioeconomic status (SES) students with key support and guidance to make postsecondary plans. However, how schools can effectively provide this support remains an open question and an active area of research. In some contexts, for example, school counselors serve this function, while in others, such as Peru, this role does not formally exist. This institutional setting creates an opportunity to learn about college-going support in more unstructured settings.

Extensive literature documents the barriers low-SES students face in college access decisions, which gave me some preliminary ideas of implications for low-SES youth in Peru. However, to understand how schools may effectively provide guidance in this context, I also conducted exploratory qualitative fieldwork. While my research typically employs quantitative methods grounded in economics of education frameworks, I view qualitative and small-scale exploratory work as essential for developing deeper, more contextualized research questions. Given limited data on what students themselves perceive as important barriers, this approach helps identify which frictions are most salient before designing larger-scale interventions.

Surroundings of one of the schools I visited.

I first talked with the superintendents, with whom I also coordinated the visits to the schools. The school districts that the superintendents lead serve around 15,000 and 30,000 students, respectively. Both districts serve a relatively disadvantaged population of students, with a high share of rural and low-SES students. These schools are about one and a half hours away from the main city where the free-tuition public higher education institutions (HEIs) are. Although relatively accessible, commuting costs are not trivial for these students. Overall, we can think of these students as potentially facing higher costs to access higher education.

Superintendents, principals, teachers and students in both contexts shared important insights with me regarding the challenges that they perceive as important in making this transition. Some of these insights are in line with hypotheses I was able to frame before going into the field, while others were nuanced viewpoints that have helped me understand better what stakeholders, and students in particular, see as important. Some of these are:

1. Financial barriers are perceived as the most important hurdle for higher education access. All stakeholders voiced that families’ financial constraints significantly impact the ability of students to pursue higher education. Older siblings often have the pressure to contribute with their families financially.
2. Moving out to study is a complex decision beyond financial costs. For many students in these settings, going to higher education requires a major family effort to pay for living expenses or have them live with extended family members in larger towns where most colleges are located. Moreover, moving to work and supporting family is a more common path in their networks than leaving home to study or to work while studying.
3. Most efforts to smooth the transition to higher education are school-driven and in collaboration with local government. Some of these initiatives include providing after-school preparation for entrance exams (free of charge or with small fees to parents), organizing vocational fairs and providing information on programs available in public tuition-free institutions. This makes the support students get at schools very different depending on the school leadership and teacher composition.
4. Principals and teachers do not know application and enrollment figures for higher education at their school. Although school leaders and teachers are aware of high school dropout rates, they do not seem to have the same knowledge about the share of students who transition into higher education. This lack of information potentially limits the ability of the school to focus efforts or set realistic goals to improve the support provided to students.
5. Students perceive that they lack information on various dimensions to plan for higher education. Students mentioned that they would like to receive information on programs, institutions, requirements and expected salaries a bit earlier in their secondary school journey. Some of them said that by their senior year, they feel a lot of pressure to decide what to do, and in some cases, it was too late to adjust their behavior.

Students chatting outside during recess. This was the first day of the 15-day period that they will spend in-residence at school.

One of the schools I visited has some special characteristics worth noting. The school follows an “alternating” schedule. Every month, students spend fifteen days at school, and the remaining at home. This framework is one of three nationwide strategies created to serve rural and isolated communities. The flexibility offered by the alternating schedule is meant to encourage secondary school completion, which is lower in rural than in urban areas.

These schools employ a pedagogical model to provide students with meaningful skills to develop an income-generating project related to their families’ economic activity. Most of them are farming communities. Among the places I visited was an all-girls school that follows this model and that is considered by the school district to be doing well in terms of encouraging post-secondary paths. The principal shared that a channel they focus on promoting is the national scholarship program that covers moving costs for high-achieving students. 

Figure 3 Post-it notes on students’ motivations. One of them reads “to start college, join a theater and dance club, meet more people, travel.”

Students said they sought higher education because of opportunities to have a good job and career prospects. But they also share some non-wage motivations such as learning new things, traveling, exploring hobbies and “becoming good at something.” Some also mentioned that they were excited to use their talent to help their communities.

When asked about what they would suggest as ideas to improve the support that they currently receive at school to build and act upon their higher education plans, students shared some ideas:

1. Learn more about how occupations relate to fields of study. Students mentioned that they hear a lot about fields of study, but it is not clear to them what type of jobs or activities degree holders in these fields do. They mentioned that having conversations with people who work in their fields of interest will be helpful in deciding.
2. Receive information on programs, institutions and requirements early on so that they have time to adjust and anticipate what they need to do. Some students voiced the importance of learning about requirements for scholarships when they can invest time and effort to improve grades and become eligible.
3. Learn more about career opportunities related to their major of interest. Many students share that they would like to learn the potential wages and career prospects of their majors of interest.

Visiting these schools and learning from stakeholders, particularly from students themselves, was a rich experience, both personally and for my research. I was able to listen to the viewpoints of those who are at the center on my research agenda. Reflecting on my summer trip, I feel both hopeful and a bit overwhelmed. Schools can and should be places where we compensate for persistent inequities that do not allow everyone to realize their potential. The realities of many students in disadvantaged rural contexts are entangled with a myriad of issues, which make the task of supporting them both more difficult and also more urgent.