Higher education and the "It pays to be pilo" program in Colombia

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the “Ser pilo paga” program, a public higher education financing policy adopted by the Colombian government in the current 2014-2018 period. Since its creation, the program has been a matter of controversy in the country. The government presents it as a great innovation in higher education that improves educational coverage and ensures greater educational access to young people from low-income families. However, academic experts, politicians and the press have questioned the effectiveness of the program, criticizing its lack of legal recognition as a state policy and its low levels of coverage. This paper shows the program’s main objectives and analyzes them in the light of specific criteria, concluding that the program has an extremely limited outreach that does not enhance educational coverage, contains elements of discursive exclusion that leaves students not considered “pilos” out of the program, and does little or nothing to reduce the educational centralization, inequality and poverty that persist in the country.