Educational Inequalities in Uruguay: High School as Bottleneck for Future Social Mobility
By Diego Barril, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata and Cecilia Llambí.
Uruguay experienced between 2002 and 2019 the greatest expansion period in recent history, with an accumulated 87% growth at constant prices. The uptick in economic activity was reflected in social indicators: Poverty fell from 32.5% in 2006 to 8.2% in 2019, while the Gini index improved from 45.9 in 2006 to 39.7% in 2019, denoting greater equality in income distribution.
However, despite the virtuous performance at the macroeconomic level, education has had dissimilar results, with areas where progress is negligible. The first positive aspect is the rise in the average number of years of education of young adults. However, this growth has not yet closed the gap between people in the highest and lowest income quintile, which remains at around 60%. This contrasts sharply with the results of household surveys for the rest of the countries in Latin America, where educational expansion has been partially closing socioeconomic gaps in the years of formal education achieved by young adults.
To better understand this, it is worth analyzing the situation of different educational levels. In the last fifteen years, Uruguay has made significant strides in the coverage in extreme educational levels. First, the gross enrollment rates of children between 3 and 5 years of age have improved considerably, and have done so in addition to closing socio-economic and urban-rural gaps. The greatest expansion occurred among 3-year-olds, for whom the offer of Child and Family Care Centers (CAIF) and public initial schools was expanded. At the other end is the remarkable expansion of university enrollment that has been observed for little over ten years, which has almost doubled in the number of new students per year in public universities. This occurred within the framework of the territorial deconcentration and expansion of regional centers outside the capital by the University of the Republic (UDELAR), as well as the creation and expansion of the Technological University (UTEC), also with the main focus on the countryside. An auspicious result of these expansions is that today we have a significant fraction of people who are “first generation” university students in their families. However, this first generation is not composed of young people from the most vulnerable environments in Uruguay, but are mostly children of parents who completed at least secondary education.
To a large extent, these problems of educational progress in Uruguay are associated with a bottleneck at the secondary level, especially in young people of lower socioeconomic status. While great progress has been made in secondary school access in recent years, gross enrollment rates for young people aged 13 to 17 in the poorest quintile are still among the lowest across Latin America. This contrasts with results among young people in the richest quintile, for whom enrollment rates stand at the highest levels in the region. If we consider completion of secondary education rather than enrollment, the gaps widen further. These inequalities at high school level then translate into large differences in enrollment at higher educational levels, which leave Uruguay among the countries with the lowest proportion of young people from the poorest quintile pursuing some type of higher education, and among those with a higher percentage of young people from the richest quintile enrolled in college level courses (comparable to Argentina and Chile).
This evidence contrasts with the history of high educational levels in Uruguay at the turn of the twentieth century. An analysis based on population and housing census data covering living conditions in 22 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past century helps us better understand these patterns. Figure 1 shows the percentages of people born in different decades during the last century who completed different educational levels. Uruguay was one of the Latin American countries with the largest fraction of its population completing the educational level considered “high” at the start of the last century, i.e. primary education. But since then—and in contrast to the advances in virtually all the countries of the region—Uruguay has lagged behind. The percentage of people who complete the secondary level or further has been stagnating for people born in the 1950s onwards. For example, for those born in the 1980s, the fraction that completed at least high school exceeds 50% for the average of 22 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, while it is close to 40% for Uruguay.
This feeble progress in completing the highest education levels has also limited the possibilities for upward educational mobility. If we focus on young people with parents who did not finish high school, the portion that manages to finish that level has stagnated in Uruguay, with even a setback for some cohorts, which differs from the trend in the rest of the region (Figure 2). This has not been the case for primary education, where the evolution of upward mobility in Uruguay is similar to the results across the region.
It is important to keep in mind these sources of educational inequality that, while evident in secondary education, have different causes. Skills building is a slow process, starting early in life and feeding off contributions from multiple training environments, which transcend the role of formal educational institutions. That is why it is important to bear in mind that the inequalities observed at a certain point in people’s lives can be the result of multiple inequalities that operate in dimensions as varied as school, family and other contexts that can consolidate or hinder the possibilities of a higher and more egalitarian level of human capital in future generations.
In this connection, it is crucial to continue enhancing the supply and quality of services aimed at early childhood (whose impacts can be seen in the medium and long term), as well as to address the bottlenecks that hamper the successful transit through secondary education of current young generations and to reconnect those who have dropped out along the way. In this context, CAF’s support to Uruguay in the education sector focuses on two main axes: first, financing for the expansion of the offer (infrastructure), mainly of CAIF centers and initial education (kindergartens and schools); and second, technical assistance to improve the quality of early childhood services and to develop initiatives that help improve the educational journey and the acquisition of relevant skills for insertion into contemporary society. With these actions, CAF supports Uruguay on the path of reducing educational inequalities to lay the foundations for a process of sustainable growth with social inclusion in the future.
