Hard Cash and Soft Skills: Experimental Evidence on Combining Scholarships and Mentoring in Argentina

The Scholarship and Mentoring Program (SMP) that we evaluate in this study provides a scholarship and a non-academic mentoring session each month to secondary school students throughout the academic year. It run by one of the largest education non-profits in Argentina. It is the longest-standing program of its kind in the country: it has been in place since 1997. It is also the largest such program run by a non-profit in Argentina: in 2015, it reached 2,544 students across 16 of the 24 provinces of the country.

Typically, students are invited to apply to the program in their last year of secondary school (grade 7). Representatives from the non-profit interview all applicants (with their parents) and select which students will be invited to join. If students are admitted, they can remain in the program from the first (grade 8) to the last grade (grade 12) of secondary school, provided that they comply with three requirements: (a) they remain enrolled in a program-affiliated school; (b) they do not repeat grades; and (c) they are not suspended from school. For the purposes of this evaluation, the non-profit agreed to forgo its regular selection process, invite students to apply, and allow us to randomly select those who would be admitted. However, it maintained its three requirements for students to remain in the program.

2014-03-01

2017-11-30

Academic behaviors; Academic mindsets, perseverance, and learning strategies; School performance; Student achievement; Personality traits

We invited 10 public secondary schools in the PBA to participate in the study based on three criteria set out by the non-profit: (a) they had to serve students from low-income families (because this is the target demographic of the program); (b) they had to have previously participated in the SMP (because it was preferable that they were familiar with the requirements of the program); and (c) they could not be participating in the SMP at the time of recruitment (because the non-profit wanted to avoid having students chosen by the regular admission process and by lottery in the same school). A representative from the non-profit met with the principal of each of these schools to invite them to participate the evaluation.

All schools accepted to participate. Each school was located in a different district (localidad) within the PBA, including: Campana, Ensenada, Gregorio de Laferrere, Guernica, José C. Paz, Merlo, Quilmes, Santos Lugares, Virrey del Pino, and Zárate.

We invited a random subset of grade 7 students at each school to participate in the study. We randomly selected two grade 7 sections per school, the non-profit sent the parents of these students invitations to attend a recruiting session, and representatives from the non-profit held multiple sessions at each school to accommodate parents' scheduling needs. Then, a representative from the non-profit met with all interested parents and their children to explain the requirements of the program and the evaluation and collect their baseline data. This process resulted in 408 interested students who were entered into a lottery roster. The number of available spots at each school was determined by the amount of funds that the non-profit had raised to cover the costs of the program at that school.

We randomly assigned students in the lottery roster to a treatment group, which was offered the program, or to a control group, which was not offered the program. This lottery resulted in 204 students in each group. As it is typically the case with the program, the offer of the program allowed students to potentially remain in the program until they graduated from high school, provided that they complied with the program's requirements.

Students, clustered within schools

Yes

10 clusters (schools)

408 students

204 students in each experimental group