How much do companies know what contributes to education?

Abstract

In this research we evaluate the impact that various types of private contributions to public schools can have on their performance. We start from the assumption that greater involvement in the social role of business is key to accelerating the achievement of development goals. Although there is abundant literature that measures different types of effects from private aid to education at an individual level, this study provides an aggregate measure of the effect of simultaneous interventions. We use a benchmarking approach on a sample of 269,117 Colombian students from 1,224 schools, of which 53% received some assistance. The findings may help to stimulate companies to participate in solving the problems of development, while calling attention to some social criteria that can improve the allocative efficiency of such resources. The results suggest that a consistent process of accountability is also required to quantify the real impact of these contributions.

Keywords:

• Education
• efficiency
• education
• data envelopment analysis
• developing countries

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A table with the articles is available from the authors upon request.

2 Here we fix the value of m depending on the number of DMU’s declared outliers. To do that, we apply the 5% rule.

3 Here we are following Simar (2003) and we fix B = 200. This level of repetitions seems to be a reasonable choice.

4 The records of the SIIPE database are registered through the administrative registry on a voluntary basis. Each institution decides whether or not to register their initiatives with the assistance and incentives of the Empresarios Por la Educación Foundation. More information can be obtained at https://siipe.fundacionexe.org.co/

5 For such initiatives the categories created by the SIIPE are taken as a basis, and are available from the authors upon request.

6 The methodology can be consulted in Decree 501 of 2016, approved by the Ministry of Education.

7 Due to space constraints, the Probit model regressions are not presented here; they are available from the authors upon request.