The challenge
Developing countries invest heavily in sending their most talented students abroad for postgraduate education, yet evidence on whether these programs achieve their goals—returning skilled graduates, boosting domestic research capacity, and fostering innovation—remains scarce. Evaluating such programs requires overcoming major data limitations: tracking graduates across countries, linking education outcomes to long-term career and scientific outputs, and establishing credible causal identification. This collaboration addresses these challenges by combining unique administrative data access with quasi-experimental designs and innovative data linkage across international platforms.
The research
This program examines the returns to graduate education investments, career trajectories of developing-country talent, and pathways to building domestic innovation capacity. Through a strategic partnership with Colfuturo—Colombia’s preeminent funder of postgraduate studies abroad—we conduct several interlinked projects. These include a quasi-experimental evaluation of the impact of Colfuturo’s flagship scholarship-loan program (Programa Crédito Beca) on knowledge production, diffusion and adoption, exploiting administrative records covering more than 38,000 applicants matched with employment histories (Revelio Labs), scientific publications (OpenAlex), and Colombian government records. Another project evaluates Colfuturo’s Semillero de Talentos mentoring program, a progressive initiative aimed at increasing the representation and success of underprivileged and minority potential applicants to the PCB program.
The impact
Colfuturo uses the research findings as advocacy tools with policymakers and donors across Latin America. The flagship evaluation will provide the first rigorous causal evidence on the effects of graduate scholarship-loan programs on education, employment, and innovation outcomes in developing countries. This project is co-funded by Colfuturo and by the University of Melbourne through a Faculty of Business and Economics Strategic Partnership Grant.
Our researchers
Melbourne Institute - Nicolás Salamanca
Department of Economics - Alexandra de Gendre
Bocconi University - Juan David Garcia Gonzales