De Facto School Choice and Socioeconomic Segregation in Secondary Schools of Argentina

Argentina’s educational system is made out of a State-run and a private sector. Private school choice is subject to household income since all private schools charge fees, which may, however, vary widely. Drawing on household survey data and focusing on the secondary school level in Buenos Aires, we first build a nested logit model and attempt to identify determinants of public-private school choice across the city’s neighborhoods. Second, we analyze socioeconomic segregation across public, private religious and private non-religious schools. Results show that the education of the head of household and income are good predictors in the school choice decision. Still, we note that privatization encompasses very different social strata and thus Buenos Aires is not strictly the case where private schools serve exclusively children from well-off backgrounds. Finally, segregation indices show a quite homogeneous socioeconomic composition within each type of school and three quite different realities among each sector.