[{"jcr:title":"Insper launches book evaluating the impact of Brazil’s financial-educational incentive program and outlining paths to reduce high school dropout","cq:tags_0":"area-de-conhecimento:políticas-públicas","cq:tags_1":"centro-de-conhecimento:centro-de-gest-o-e-pol-ticas-p-blicas"},{"richText":"The publication combines international evidence, structural modeling, and a simulation tool to analyze how different scholarship designs affect students’ ability to stay in school","authorDate":"26/03/2026 11h55","madeBy":"Por","tag":"centro-de-conhecimento:centro-de-gest-o-e-pol-ticas-p-blicas","title":"Insper launches book evaluating the impact of Brazil’s financial-educational incentive program and outlining paths to reduce high school dropout","variant":"imagecolor"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"text":"Reducing high school dropout rates requires more than expanding access to education: it demands understanding why so many students leave school, which barriers weigh most in different contexts, and to what extent public policies can change these trajectories. This is the starting point of Scholarships and Dropout: Ex-Ante Impact Evaluation , a book launched by Insper on March 13. The study examines, based on evidence, the potential of programs that provide financial incentives to low-income students conditional on school attendance — such as Brazil’s Pé-de-Meia, a financial-educational incentive program that offers stipends and savings incentives to encourage students to remain in high school — to address one of the country’s most pressing education challenges. Authored by Ricardo Paes de Barros, Laura Muller Machado, Laura Almeida Ramos de Abreu, and Samuel Franco, the book brings together four years of research and is accompanied by a public simulator that allows policymakers to estimate the impact of different scholarship designs in specific contexts. The publication originated from a question posed to Insper’s Center for Evidence in Full-Time Education (CEEI) by Instituto Natura and Instituto Sonho Grande: what is the capacity — and under what conditions — can financial incentives reduce dropout in Brazil? The CEEI is an initiative of the Educational Policy and Productive Inclusion Cell (NPEIP), which is part of Insper’s Center for Public Management & Policy (CGPP). “The book began with a question from Instituto Natura and Instituto Sonho Grande that strongly motivated and inspired us: what is the capacity, and under what conditions, can a scholarship reduce dropout in Brazil,” said Laura Machado, coordinator of the NPEIP. From this starting point, the study advanced across multiple fronts: international evidence review, discussions with the scientific community, dialogue with state education systems, presentations to the Ministry of Education, and the development of a tool capable of simulating policy scenarios before implementation. In the opening session, Maria Slemenson, Superintendent of Instituto Natura Brazil, connected the topic to public policy design. “Not every extended school day benefits students. A poor-quality school for twice as long is simply a worse school,” she said. Catherina Rigato, Operations Manager at Instituto Sonho Grande, emphasized the economic and social cost of dropout: “The cost of preventing dropout is less than 10% of the social cost generated when a young person leaves school.” Tania Haddad, President of Insper’s Board, placed the book within the institution’s mission to connect research with real-world challenges: “Academic research should never be detached from the real problems faced by society.” High, unequal dropout rates linked to vulnerability Laura Abreu, Executive Coordinator of the Educational and Productive Inclusion Policy Cell, presented the diagnostic underlying the book. Although basic education is mandatory until age 17, Brazil still faces a cumulative high school dropout rate of around 23%. In other words, approximately one in four students who enter this stage do not complete it. On an annual basis, this represents roughly 800,000 interrupted educational trajectories. She highlighted the deeply unequal nature of the phenomenon. “The probability that a young Black male from the state of Roraima, living in a rural area, whose parents have low levels of education and live in poverty, will not complete basic education is 77%,” she said. At the opposite extreme, for a young woman from an educated family living in an urban area in São Paulo, the risk drops to 9%. According to the data used in the study, the main reason cited for dropout remains the need to work or take on caregiving responsibilities. At the same time, lack of interest or the perception that school does not offer sufficient value for the future has become increasingly relevant. Commenting on the findings, Reynaldo Fernandes, Full Professor at USP, noted that dropout should not be seen as a sudden decision. “Dropout is the end of a process in which students gradually disengage from school,” he said. In his view, programs like Pé-de-Meia can address some risk factors, but not all. He emphasized the need to strengthen a culture of public policy evaluation in Brazil: “We need to ensure evaluations are conducted both ex-ante and ex-post. Brazil still has a very limited culture of evaluating its programs.” What the book concludes about Pé-de-Meia Ricardo Paes de Barros, Academic Coordinator of the CGPP and holder of the Instituto Unibanco Chair at Insper, presented the core methodological approach: ex-ante evaluation. Instead of waiting to observe the effects of a policy already implemented, the model aims to anticipate its likely impact based on evidence and behavioral assumptions. “The only way to answer this ex-ante is to think the way young people think,” he said. The model assumes that the decision to stay in school or drop out is made by real individuals, in real contexts, considering factors such as family income, pressure to work, location, perceived school quality, and expectations about the future. The goal is to represent this decision-making process and enable more precise simulations of scholarship impacts. Presenting the results, Laura Machado showed that, in the study’s baseline scenario, the estimated average impact of Pé-de-Meia is a reduction of 6.3 percentage points in cumulative high school dropout. “Given that total dropout is 23%, what we are saying is that for every four students who would drop out, one remains in school because of the program,” she explained. In practical terms, this means that about one-quarter of students who would otherwise leave school complete high school with the incentive. The study also shows that another student delays dropout to a later grade, while the remaining two, on average, do not change their decision. This is one of the study’s central contributions: showing that Pé-de-Meia has a meaningful and positive effect, but does not solve the problem on its own. As Laura Machado summarized, “Pé-de-Meia alone is not capable of solving our dropout problem. It contributes to addressing one out of every four cases.” Another important finding is that the program has a positive cost-benefit ratio: the social benefits of additional schooling outweigh its costs. However, the book does not translate this into blanket support for any program design. On the contrary, one of its key conclusions is that impact depends strongly on how the program is structured. The first implication is that increases in the total benefit tend to produce diminishing returns: additional resources can improve outcomes, but at a slower rate. The second is that the distribution of payments throughout high school matters. According to the authors, concentrating a larger share of the benefit in the final year tends to increase impact without necessarily raising total expenditure. The study also shows that context matters. When the simulator considers situations in which students cannot balance work and study, the estimated impact of the incentive decreases. This suggests that in educational models with fewer opportunities for parallel income, financial incentives need to be larger to produce equivalent effects. In other words, the book does not only address whether the program works, but under which conditions it works best. Results also vary by region. The impact of Pé-de-Meia is greater in states and contexts with higher concentrations of vulnerable youth, such as Ceará, Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão, Alagoas, and Amazonas. According to the study, targeting matters: the effect tends to be stronger where dropout is more closely linked to conditions that the policy can influence. Another conclusion with immediate implications for federal coordination concerns the limited complementarity between the federal program and existing state-level scholarships. The evaluation suggests that when similar programs overlap, additional gains are small. In such cases, a more promising alternative would be to redesign local initiatives for complementary roles, such as supporting the transition to higher education, individualized mentoring, or other types of incentives. Vitor Pereira, Professor at UFRJ’s Institute of Economics, praised the use of structural economics directly oriented toward public policy and noted that such efforts remain rare. He also suggested that future evaluations consider not only dropout and completion, but also longer-term effects on young people’s life decisions, such as labor market participation. In the discussion session, Cecília Machado, Professor at PUC-Rio, reinforced that the relevance of ex-ante evaluation does not eliminate the need for ex-post evaluation. Her argument was that design matters, but implementation also matters. She therefore advocated for greater transparency regarding budgets, beneficiaries, and administrative data, enabling rigorous future evaluations. The final panel brought together federal congresswoman Tabata Amaral, author of the bill that led to Pé-de-Meia, and Marisa de Santana da Costa, Director of Student Incentives in Basic Education at the Ministry of Education, representing Secretary Katia Schweickardt. The discussion was moderated by Yuri Oliveira, Public Policy Coordinator at Instituto Natura Brazil. Tabata shared insights from the legislative process and recalled that the program was initially designed to operate alongside Bolsa Família but was later moved to the Ministry of Education for political reasons. She also noted that the savings component was nearly removed during negotiations. In defending the policy, she addressed a frequent criticism that, in her view, ignores structural inequalities: “The criticism I hear most often is: ‘No one paid me to study.’ And then you start asking: who washed your clothes? Who paid for your transportation? Did you have enough to eat?” At the same time, she stated that she does not support universalizing the program and argued that next steps should include mentoring, technical education, and full-time schooling. Representing the Ministry of Education, Marisa Costa emphasized the educational and intersectoral nature of Pé-de-Meia. “We must understand that Pé-de-Meia was designed as an educational program with educational objectives,” she said. According to her, its implementation requires coordination with other policies aimed at keeping students in school. More than measuring the effects of Pé-de-Meia, the discussion made clear that addressing dropout requires a combination of financial incentives, careful policy design, and strong evaluation capacity. One of the book’s central contributions is to show that scholarship programs can make a difference, but their results depend on how they are structured and how they interact with other strategies to promote school retention."},{"jcr:title":"Samuel Franco, Laura Abreu, Ricardo Paes de Barros, Laura Muller Machado, Marisa de Santana da Costa, Tabata Amaral and Yuri Oliveira","fileName":"Lançamento livro_Bolsas de estudo e evasão.jpg","alt":"Samuel Franco, Laura Abreu, Ricardo Paes de Barros, Laura Muller Machado, Marisa de Santana da Costa, Tabata Amaral e Yuri Oliveira"},{"fileName":"Livro_Bolsas de estudo e evasão .jpg","alt":"Livro "Bolsas de Estudo e Evasão""}]