The effect of ICT access at home on academic failure: The case of Buenos Aires province, Argentina

Abstract

From the economy of education academic field, different determinants of the educational performance have been examined with conclusive results. Nevertheless, the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is not yet well defined. Therefore, papers with positive, negative and null effects coexist. This dissent in the empirical evidence encourages the analysis of ICT on education. Besides, the actual context of social distance because of the COVID-19 pandemic yields an increasing interest on ICT in all the fields but especially in the academic field due to impossibility of face-to-face classes. Then, the objective of this paper is studying the relationship between ICT access at home and scholar failure, which is defined as the not-reachable basic scholar performance level at the last year of high school. The hypothesis is that access to computers and Internet at home reduces the probability of scholar failure. Then, we estimate an econometric model based on the Propensity Score Matching Technique. By using data from the national evaluation of learning “Aprender 2016” for the last year of high school at the Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, we obtain evidence that confirms the hypothesis.