Miguel Urquiola is a professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University.  He is also a member of the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and of the Columbia Committee on the Economics of Education. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and has held appointments at Cornell University, the World Bank, the Bolivian Catholic University, and the Bolivian government.

In this episode, Urquiola talks about the role of competition on educational outcomes in a region where education coverage is larger than expected for the income level of Latin American countries, but where performance, as measured by an international standardized test, is lower than expected using that same metric. In evaluating the experiences with competition and choice at different educational levels, based on data from Chile, Colombia, and the US, Urquiola highlights that education markets do not necessarily always work as expected. In areas where metrics are clearer, such as research, market competition can produce excellence as shown by top US universities. In areas where metrics are less clear, such as teaching, information is not sufficiently good to provide rewards for better performance. Instead, choice can result in sorting around other criteria producing the selection of options that are not necessarily related to the educational performance of schools and universities.