MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CMC) — A new World Bank report says that while higher education is expanding in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), it is still falling short of potential.

The report, At a Crossroads: Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, released here recently, says the number of students in higher education programmes has nearly doubled in the past decade across the region, but, with only half of them graduating on time, there’s still a lot to do in terms of efficiency and quality.“Higher education is key to boosting growth and reducing poverty and inequality,” said World Bank Vice-President for Latin America and the Caribbean Jorge Familiar. “To ensure equity of opportunities, the region has to enhance quality of education and provide students with better information on programmes, adequate incentives and financing options, and connections to the labour market.“Better regulation of higher education institutions is also needed to improve accountability for the services they provide,” he added, stating that a good education plays an important role in improving income prospects.In particular, the report finds that, on average, in LAC a student with a higher education degree will earn more than twice as much as a student with a high school diploma.In the region, the percentage of individuals ages 18 to 24 enrolled in higher education rose from 21 per cent in 2000 to 40 per cent in 2010, the World Bank said.While unequal access still abounds, the bank said there has been substantial progress, particularly among low and middle-income groups.On average, the bank said the poorest 50 per cent of the population only represented 16 per cent of higher education students in 2000, but that rose to about 25 per cent in 2013.At the same time, about a quarter of the higher education institutions (HEIs) that exist today were opened over that period — many of them by the private sector — lifting the market share of private HEIs from 43 to 50 per cent between the early 2000s and 2013, the World Bank said.And yet, of the top-500 HEIs in the world, the region has only about 10, a number only higher than Africa’s, the bank said.“There has been a big expansion in higher education institutions and enrolment, particularly for low-income students,” said the report’s lead author, World Bank Senior Economist Maria Marta Ferreyra.“However, the results fall short of their potential, with only half of the students entering higher education receiving their degree by the time they are 25 to 29 years old, either because they are still studying or because they have dropped out,”she added.Ferreyra said some of the causes for a high dropout rate include academic unpreparedness — due in part to low quality education received in high school, and lack of financial means of low-income students.She said some of the causes may also include the long duration of some of the programmes and lack of flexibility to switch between them — “issues that are especially relevant now as more people tend to switch jobs and careers over a lifetime than ever before”.The World Bank said policies that can help address some of these problems include generating and disseminating information on institution and programme performance so that students can make informed choices.Other policies are designing better funding systems in order to provide incentives for institutions and students to achieve good results, and removing financial barriers to higher education access through instruments such as scholarships, grants for living expenses, and student loans.The World Bank also said helping students connect to the labour market, and improving oversight and regulations to ensure the institutions’ accountability for their services are other policies that can help address some of the causes of high dropout rate.Still, the report says that forming skilled human capital is not enough on its own to raise productivity, growth, and equity.“There also needs to be an environment in which firms can create good jobs that, in turn, can make productive use of a more skilled labour force,” the report says.