Inequality of opportunity in Peru: How can young people develop relevant skills and find decent employment in a rapidly changing labour market?

尽管秘鲁在过去几十年中取得了重要的经济和社会成就，但该国的教育体系和劳动力市场仍然不发达，而且高度不平等，阻碍了年轻人获得有意义的工作的可能性。我们的研究将通过观察是什么推动了秘鲁年轻人在高等教育、培训和技能获取方面的决策，来研究这一问题背后的原因；是什么限制了儿童和青少年时期的技能发展；以及为什么一些秘鲁青年男女比其他人更有可能找到体面和有意义的工作。我们遵循三层方法：我们首先研究影响年轻人接受高等教育决定的因素，特别关注进入高质量或低质量高等教育机构的年轻人所拥有的技能类型（认知和社会情感）。我们还研究了决定秘鲁青年男女职业选择的因素，强调了社会和性别规范的作用。然后，我们转而分析具体的技能：认知（数学、语言）、社会情感（决心、团队合作）或技术（包括数字）。我们评估了这些因素对获得正式工作的影响，目的是为年轻的正式工人构建教育、技能和培训概况。年轻人未来的收入预期也会被检查，看他们是否与劳动力市场的现实相匹配。这将阐明，关于劳动力市场的信息不完整是否是年轻人从事低回报活动的根本原因。接下来，我们将重点关注儿童和青少年时期技能习得方面的不平等。具体来说，我们研究了谁有机会获得高质量的教育和培训，以及早期生活环境在调解获得相关技能方面的作用。我们特别注意秘鲁的基础教育制度在培养适当技能方面的有效程度。最终，我们的目标是找出优秀的学校——那些在具有挑战性的环境中拥有非常优秀学生的学校——并根据他们的教师、课程和基础设施特征来描述它们。最后，我们调查了两项旨在提高年轻人技能的特别举措的有效性。第一个是学校改善计划（“Jornada Escolar Completa”），增加目标学校的接触时间和资源。其次，我们研究了培训计划的潜在作用，为那些无法完成正式学业的人提供第二次机会。我们收录了年轻人的声音和经历，以阐明教育和培训在他们的工作轨迹中的作用，以及他们在获得有意义的工作时所面临的支持和障碍。这项研究是基于对15年来现有数据的分析——两组儿童从出生到15岁和8到22岁。此外，还提供学校的配套资料，包括学校的设施、课程和教师资格。我们将通过收集新的定性数据（通过半结构化访谈和焦点小组）进一步补充分析，针对就业青年和失业青年以及在职业和培训机构就读的青年两个子样本，研究他们如何评估继续教育、培训和工作之间的权衡，以及他们如何将有意义的工作概念化。秘鲁的案例确实说明了许多中低收入国家面临的挑战，这些国家在提高教育水平方面也取得了重要进展，但在学习、技能获取和青年获得有意义的工作方面仍然存在严重的不平等现象。因此，我们旨在开展的高质量、及时和与政策相关的研究有可能在秘鲁以外的其他中低收入国家形成政策和建议。

Despite important economic and social achievements in Peru in the last decades, the country's education system and labour market remain both under-developed and highly unequal, hindering young people's possibilities for accessing meaningful jobs. Our research will examine the reasons behind this problem by looking at what drives young Peruvians' decision-making in relation to their higher education, training, and skill acquisition; what constrains the development of skills through childhood and adolescence; and why some young Peruvian men and women are more likely than others to find decent and meaningful work. We follow a three-tier approach:We begin by looking at the factors affecting young people's decision to enrol in higher education, paying particular attention to the types of skills (cognitive and socio-emotional) that young people who access high- or low-quality higher education institutions possess. We also look at what defines young Peruvian men's and women's career choices, highlighting the role of social and gender norms. We then turn to analysing specific sets of skills: cognitive (maths, language), socio-emotional (determination, teamwork), or technical (including digital). We evaluate how these each matter for accessing formal jobs with the aim of constructing education, skill and training profiles for young formal workers. Future earning expectations of young people are also examined to see whether they are matched with the labour market reality. This will shed light on whether incomplete information about the labour market is an underlying reason why young people engage in low-return activities.Next, we focus on inequality in skills acquisition during childhood and adolescence. Specifically we examine who has access to quality education and training and the role of early-life circumstances in mediating the acquisition of relevant skills. We pay particular attention to the extent to which the basic education system in Peru is effective in developing appropriate skills. Ultimately, we aim to identify outstanding schools - those with very good students in challenging settings - and profile them in terms of their teacher, programme, and infrastructure characteristics.Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of two particular initiatives that are aimed at improving skills of young people. The first is a school-improvement program ("Jornada Escolar Completa") that increases both the contact hours in targeted schools and their resources. Second, we examine the potential role of training schemes to offer a second chance to those individuals who are not able to complete their formal studies. We include young people's voices and experiences to shed light on the role of education and training in their work trajectories and of the support and barriers they face in accessing meaningful work. The study is based on analysis of existing data spanning 15 years - on two cohorts of children as they have aged from birth to 15 years old and 8 to 22 years old. This is supplemented with matching information on schools - including their facilities, programmes and teacher qualifications. We will further complement the analysis by collecting new qualitative data (though semi-structured interviews and focus groups) for two subsamples of employed and unemployed youth and of those attending vocational and training institutions to examine how they evaluate the trade-offs between further education, training and work and how they conceptualise meaningful work.The Peruvian case does illuminate the challenges faced by many LMICs that also have made important strides towards increased education, but where hard inequalities persist in terms of learning, acquisition of skills and youth access to meaningful jobs. The high-quality, timely and policy-relevant research that we aim to produce has thus the potential of shaping policy and recommendations in other LMIC countries, beyond Peru.