Explora Tu Futuro

The supply of education alternatives is larger than ever. However, disadvantaged students often lack the network and counselors to navigate through the alternatives and make the best educational and financial decision.

Our solution is to use both schools’ and administrative data to advise students and their families in a personalized way, while still incorporating the support of teachers and counselors. We achieve this through partnerships with policymakers, the use of data science, software development, and the appropriate data visualizations. Our platform will guide students along their feasible options, considering their interests, characteristics, and potential labor market outcomes. 

There is increasing evidence that this kind of information interventions decreases school dropout, increases higher education enrollment, and raises future earnings. It is not just about getting into college --- it is about helping students to find the right fit, so they have higher chances of being successful in what they are doing.

There is a growing first generation of students who are looking for accessible higher education options. On the other hand, there is a growing supply of programs, including many low-quality institutions which charge low prices trying to attract this new demand with strong marketing strategies. Therefore, the information is highly decentralized and complex to navigate and even more difficult for those who do not have a network with post-secondary education. Low- and middle-income students have very little information and guidance to make educational decisions, including what and where to study, and how to finance it. Decisions are usually made with incomplete information, based on preconceptions and sometimes erroneous beliefs. 

This situation leads some students to make decisions that are harmful to their future, such as not studying, choosing careers with low returns, or taking loans that they will not be able to pay, increasing their probability of dropout and default. Unfortunately, these problems are even more pervasive among low-income students, who make up the majority of enrollments in the worst-performing programs. Several research have proven that this asymmetry helps to explain long-term inequality and earnings differences by socioeconomic status and gender.

Our innovation benefits secondary students, mainly first-generation students from disadvantaged families, who due to a lack of information and assistance, usually make educational decisions that have  harmful consequences to their future. 

There is extensive literature supporting the fact that if students receive the right information at the right time, this potential negative trajectory could be mitigated. There is evidence from the Dominican Republic that giving information about educational returns was translated into an average of 0.2-0.35 more years of school and a lower probability of drop out. Other studies have found significant effects on the likelihood of continuing in secondary school, improving access to higher education and  better future labor perspective. 

This innovation comes from a need raised by the Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic.  During 2019 we worked together with them to centralize higher education information and create the first version of the platform, where students could explore this information in a friendly and personalized way. During this process, we implemented a survey to disadvantaged students. We detected that students were interested in continuing their education, however, they decided not to apply mainly because they find the process complicated, or they didn’t know how to finance it.

ExploraTuFuturo combines school data, under-utilized administrative data collected by the government, and data science to give students personalized advice in their transition to postsecondary education. This platform allows students and their parents to connect with teachers and counselors.  Using the platform, students can search and explore educational options that are interesting for them, learn about labor market outcomes for students with similar characteristics, and test their beliefs about several features of their options of interest. Moreover, they can find information about the application process and requirements, and receive tasks, alerts and nudges from their professor, all in order to make progress to achieve their higher education goals. 

Our platform benefits several different parties:

1. Students & Parents: Helping families to search, compare, and analyze between higher educational options and their characteristics. For instance, wage returns, duration, costs, curriculum, application processes, financial options, among others.

2. Teachers & Counselors:  Providing a platform to communicate teachers/counselors with students, assigning tasks and  monitoring student progress. 

3. School Managers: Through challenging the beliefs of the users about specific options, it allows managers to track the informational gaps that are present among their students, giving useful insights to focus their efforts.

4. Higher Education Institutions: The platform facilitates a place to allocate accurately and quality information about their programs and attributes, for example, campus life, libraries, or laboratories.

5. Policymakers: Providing an infrastructure to manage tertiary education supply data that can be easily maintained and updated to make information available for everybody.

Our team of computer and data scientists is closely supported by a group of Latin American’researchers who are working and studying at the best universities in the US. They design and implement the impact evaluation of the intervention itself, and several experiments (A/B testing) within the platform to keep it fully optimized .

Using econometric models and machine learning algorithms, we learn from historical and interactional data, with the purpose of continuously improving the recommendations that we make to our users while they navigate on the platform considering student preferences, skills, and labor perspectives. 

On the other hand, we used the data generated on the platforms and administrative data to rigorously evaluate the impact of the intervention itself and every feature within the platform. 

This project is a unique opportunity to develop a scalable and cost-effective mechanism to inform, assist, and engage students and their families in the decision-making process, especially to those with few informational networks.