Chile

The two percentage-point gaps for Chile are shown next to the unweighted mean across settings. Both are defined as female minus male. A negative choice gap means that among students who have already cleared the same academic bar, women are less likely than men to rank a STEM program first.

The table summarizes features of the admission system that bear on the construction and interpretation of the analysis. Untranscribed values are marked as pending.

Chile operates a nationwide centralized admission system that, over the period we study, covered all public universities and 17 of the country's 43 private universities. Students are allocated to specific college-major combinations through a deferred-acceptance algorithm: each applicant submits a ranked list of up to ten programs and is assigned to the highest-ranked option for which she is eligible. Eligibility is determined by high school GPA, performance on the national college admission exam (the PSU), and affirmative action status. Universities set the weights placed on high school GPA and on each section of the PSU used to compute the application score for each program, and they publish the list of programs and vacancies offered for the next academic year, together with those weights, well in advance of the examination date.

Affirmative action plays a limited role in the allocation: less than 4 percent of the seats offered by the universities participating in centralized admissions are reserved for low-SES students.

Taking the exam is inexpensive for most students. In 2018, the last year we observe for Chile, the PSU registration fee was around 47 U.S. dollars, and since 2006 all graduates of public and voucher schools, 93 percent of high school students, have been eligible for a fee waiver that makes the PSU free for them. The entire registration process operates through an online platform that automatically detects a student's eligibility for the waiver.

The cycle tracks the Chilean academic year, which ends in December. Students register for the PSU in mid-August and sit the exam in early December. They receive their scores and submit their ranked application lists through an online platform by the end of December, so every applicant knows exactly where she stands before committing to a list.

In early January students learn where they were admitted and have a couple of weeks to decide whether to take or reject the offer. Once a student is matched to one of her preferences, the rest of her applications are dropped. The offer is not binding on the student: the only cost of rejecting it is losing it, and students admitted through the platform remain free to enroll at institutions outside it.

During the 2012–2018 window covered by the analysis, the centralized platform included all public universities and 17 of the country's 43 private universities, 34 of Chile's 60 universities in all. Participation has widened over time: before 2012 only nine private universities took part, eight new institutions joined the system in 2012, and since 2020 most universities have used centralized admission. Admission to two-year colleges is fully decentralized. The analysis window is chosen precisely because it is the period over which this expanded set of participating institutions is stable.

Universities outside the platform run their own admission processes and may not require applicants to take the PSU. In practice, however, the PSU still plays an important role in their admissions, because it is tied to financial incentives for both institutions and students. Adopting a different test would be costly for institutions and applicants alike; for the period studied, part of the public resources received by higher education institutions depended on the PSU performance of their first-year students, a mechanism eliminated in 2016; and the largest financial aid programs for university studies require students to score above a threshold on the PSU.

The coexistence of centralized and decentralized selection means that being admitted through the platform does not necessarily translate into enrollment: students who receive an offer are free to reject it and enroll elsewhere. The share of national enrollment accounted for by institutions outside the platform is not documented in the project's sources and would need to come from the country team.

Applicants are ranked on a program-specific application score that combines high school GPA with performance on the PSU, with the weights on GPA and on each exam section set by the universities for each program. The PSU has four sections: language, mathematics, social sciences, and natural sciences. Scores in each section are adjusted to a normal distribution with a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 110, with the extremes truncated to a minimum of 150 and a maximum of 850. To apply to university, a student must take the language and mathematics sections and at least one of the other two.

Scores are known when the list is submitted: students receive their PSU results at the end of December and apply afterward, so the ranked list can respond to where the student actually stands.

For the paper's analysis, performance groups are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders, 1,747,925 students across the 2012–2018 cycles. The measure is constructed identically for women and men; no admission adjustment, weighting, or bonus enters it. The top decile contains 174,020 students, 76,534 women and 97,486 men, so women are 44.0 percent of the high-achieving group even though they are 53.0 percent of all applicants in this setting.

The underlying records cover every student who registered to take the PSU between 2004 and 2018. The analysis sample covers the 2012–2018 admission cycles, the period over which the expanded set of participating institutions is stable. Across those cycles the data contain 1,747,925 score holders, an average of about 249.7 thousand students per year; women are 53.0 percent of all applicants. The top decile of the performance distribution contains 174,020 students, 76,534 women and 97,486 men.

Because the exam can be taken without submitting an application, roughly half of DEMRE's registered candidates go on to submit a list, and the choice gap has two defensible denominators. The paper's convention is split: panel (b) of Figure 2 and the corresponding appendix figures condition on top-decile students who submit an application list, while the threshold-robustness table, the cross-field decomposition table, and the decomposition components use the full top-decile totals reported in the provenance table. The convention moves Chile's top-10 percent choice gap from -23.1 to -24.6 percentage points and leaves every other setting unchanged. Chile should therefore not be described as simply conditioned on applicants: the conditioning applies to those figure panels only, not to the tables or the decomposition.

Additional record-level exclusions, repeat-applicant rules, and field mappings are documented in the replication code.

Admission rules in Chile do not differ by sex: the paper's Table A.III comparison of the ten systems documents no sex-conditional admission rule for this setting, and eligibility runs through academic performance, high school GPA and PSU scores, alone. The only documented seat reservation on the platform, covering less than 4 percent of seats, is based on socioeconomic status rather than sex, and the performance measure used in the analysis is constructed identically for women and men.

Our data for Chile come from DEMRE, the Chilean agency in charge of college admissions. The records include individual-level information on all students who registered to take the PSU between 2004 and 2018; the analysis sample covers the 2012–2018 admission cycles, the period over which the expanded set of participating institutions is stable.

The data include high-school performance, scores on each PSU section, ranked applications, age, gender, and parental education. Access conditions and the agency contact route have not yet been supplied for publication.