Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Effect of a Centralized Admission System on School Switching

Abstract

This thesis estimates the causal effect of Chile’s centralized school admission system (SAE) on post-assignment school switching behavior at primary and secondary entry levels. Using administrative records from the Ministry of Education covering approximately 4.5 million student-year observations from 2011 to 2020, I exploit the staggered regional rollout of the SAE across four adoption cohorts. The identification strategy employs the doubly-robust estimator of Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021), utilizing private fee-paying schools, legally exempt from the reform, as a never-treated control group. The results indicate that SAE adoption reduced annual school-level switching rates by 3.97 percentage points on average, representing a 23% decline relative to the pre-treatment baseline. This aggregate effect masks a dynamic pattern in which switching reductions are near zero at adoption but grow monotonically, reaching 8 to 9 percentage points by the third post-treatment year. The reform did not increase the probability that switches lead to higher-performing schools. The reduction is larger for students in SEP-participating schools. The effect is symmetric across primary and secondary entry levels.