- Jamaica’s PATH conditional cash transfer program has contributed to higher primary and secondary school graduation rates among low-income students.
- Among these vulnerable students, those who gain access to more selective secondary schools tend to achieve stronger academic outcomes and are more likely to continue into tertiary education.
- However, while girls in PATH benefit from selective schools at levels comparable to non-beneficiaries, gains among boys are somewhat smaller, suggesting that social protection and school quality policies may affect student groups differently.
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are central to social policy in many countries. They provide regular cash payments to poor families in exchange for keeping their children in school and taking them to regular health checkups. By encouraging investments in education and health, these programs aim to strengthen human capital and help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Research has shown that CCTs have played an important role in reducing poverty across Latin America and the Caribbean.
But what happens when these programs interact with other education policies already in place? Can cash transfers influence the results of policies designed to expand educational opportunities for vulnerable students? Recent evidence from Jamaica suggests that they can.
What the Evidence from Jamaica Shows
The experience of Jamaica’s national CCT program (PATH) shows that cash transfer programs and access to more selective secondary schools can interact in important ways, shaping educational opportunities and outcomes for vulnerable students.
These findings are explored in the paper Can Conditional Cash Transfers Alter the Effectiveness of Other Human Capital Development Policies?, which examines how PATH interacts with Jamaica’s system of assigning students to public secondary schools based on academic performance and family preferences. The analysis explores whether growing up as a PATH beneficiary changes how much students gain from attending more selective schools, as reflected in secondary school examination results.
The results show that access to more selective schools can significantly strengthen academic performance and improve access to tertiary education, while also revealing important differences in outcomes between boys and girls.
Better Schools, Better Outcomes
More selective schools in Jamaica provide better learning environments. Students in these schools are surrounded by higher-achieving peers, more qualified teachers, and stronger overall learning conditions.
PATH also has a significant direct impact on completing primary and secondary school, although no direct effects were found on learning outcomes as measured through examination results.
At the same time, vulnerable students who gain access to more selective secondary schools are more likely to pass key secondary examinations that qualify them for tertiary education and to continue into postsecondary studies and credentials.
The crucial question is whether PATH changes those gains. Here, the results differ sharply by gender:
- For girls, PATH does not alter the benefits of attending a selective school. The positive impacts of attending a more selective secondary school on academic performance are similar for PATH beneficiaries and comparable non-beneficiaries (see Figure 1, Panel A).
- For boys, the story is different. Boys in PATH still benefit from selective schools, but their gains are significantly smaller than those of otherwise similar boys who did not receive PATH (see Figure 1, Panel B).
What Are the Main Policy Implications?
First, while PATH itself does not substantially improve learning outcomes as measured through examination results, it has been effective at improving primary and secondary school graduation rates among vulnerable students. An important next step will be to assess whether these gains in educational attainment translate into improved labor market outcomes later in life.
Second, access to more selective secondary schools has large positive effects on attainment for vulnerable students in Jamaica. Protecting and expanding access to these schools remains a powerful tool for improving academic outcomes and educational opportunities.
Third, the findings suggest that CCTs can interact with other education policies in different ways across student groups. For girls, PATH does not alter the benefits of selective schools. For boys, however, gains from attending these schools are somewhat smaller among PATH beneficiaries than among comparable non-beneficiaries.
As more countries adopt and expand CCT programs, the Jamaican experience highlights the importance of understanding how these policies interact with existing education systems. Such evaluations can help identify how income support and school quality policies can best reinforce one another to expand opportunities for vulnerable students.