Increasing Access to Tertiary Education for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia
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Focus Group with Beneficiaries of ACCES loans. Photo Credit: ICETEX
The ACCES Program provided grounds for considering that financing student loans for underserved populations is sound public policy. From 2012 to 2017, the Program added 400,000 students to the Colombian tertiary education system, graduated 124,000 students, increased the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds from 58% to 64%, with women representing 57% of beneficiaries in 2017. As for its outcomes and rigorous evaluations, the Program demonstrated empirically that well-designed, demand-driven financing mechanisms such as ACCES can lead to significant positive development outcomes in education enrollment, equity, graduation, and quality, providing privately life-changing and socially cost-effective returns.