Broadcasting Education at Scale: Long-Term Labor Market Impacts of Television-Based Schools – Prof. Raissa Fabregas

• Date: March 19, 2025
• Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
• Format: In-person
• Location: Data Sciences Institute, 10th floor Seminar Room, 700 University Avenue, Toronto

Talk Title: Broadcasting Education at Scale: Long-Term Labor Market Impacts of Television-Based Schools

We examine the educational and labor market impacts of using information and communication technologies to scale up last-mile post-primary education services. Mexico’s TV-schools–lower secondary schools that substitute on-site subject-specialized teachers with televised lectures, serve over 1.4 million children every year, making it one of the largest formal mass distance education programs in the world.  Exploiting geographic variation and cohort exposure to Mexico’s TV-school openings during 1980-2000, we find that affected cohorts are 8 percentage points more likely to graduate lower secondary, with increases of 0.4 years of education and 8% in hourly earnings. Labor market returns are comparable to those from standard schools. Impacts are primarily driven by out-of-school children, with higher earning gains in urbanized areas.

Biography:

Raissa Fabregas is a development economist and an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on understanding constraints to human capital accumulation in developing countries and causally evaluating interventions and policies that mitigate these barriers at scale. She is particularly interested in understanding barriers to scaling up programs, external validity, and implementation constraints. Her current and ongoing work has examined the psycho-social impact of attending better schools, as well as the differential impacts of digital agricultural extension programs and digital mental health interventions. She is a research affiliate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Precision Development (PxD). Raissa holds a B.A. in Economics from McGill University, an MSc in Development Economics from the University of Oxford , and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University.