The Human Development Lab hosted the seminar “Challenges and Opportunities: School Admission System,” bringing together leading education experts to share their perspectives on the current School Admission System. The panel included Alejandra Arratia, Undersecretary of Education; Sylvia Eyzaguirre, Researcher at the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) (Public Policy Research Center); and Raúl Figueroa, Executive Director of the Instituto de Políticas Públicas at Universidad Andrés Bello (Institute for Public Policy at Andrés Bello University). The discussion was moderated by Andrés Barrios, researcher at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences and Director of the Human Development Lab at UANDES (Universidad de los Andes).
Held at the Library Building, the seminar attracted academics, students, and education professionals to discuss the necessary changes to the School Admission System.
At the seminar, Undersecretary of Education Alejandra Arratia emphasized several of the recommendations from the SAE Technical Committee aimed at strengthening the continuity of educational trajectories, the institutional framework of the SAE, and improving certain application processes.
Sylvia Eyzaguirre, Researcher at CEP, addressed the challenges of the School Admission System (SAE), highlighting that beyond the allocation mechanism itself, the underlying issue lies in the limited educational offer relative to the expectations of families. She further noted that the main criticisms collected by the technical committee pointed to the lack of recognition of merit, the system’s rigidity, and its limited flexibility in handling exceptional cases: “Listening to various actors in the educational system, we realized that the main complaints regarding the admission system were that it was blind to merit.”
Raúl Figueroa, Executive Director of the Instituto de Políticas Públicas at Universidad Andrés Bello and former Minister of Education, emphasized that the School Admission System does not provide adequate solutions for families seeking schools with high academic demands or those wishing to enroll their children in institutions with specific value-based educational projects. According to Figueroa: “We hope that when these issues are discussed in Congress, the focus will be on combining student learning with the freedom of education and the diversity of educational projects.”
The experts agreed that one of the main challenges of the current educational system is its limited ability to offer a sufficient variety of quality schools that align with the diverse expectations and needs of families.
