Resumen

This work examines the impact of the institutional accreditation on the Colombian universities performance into three dimensions: i) quota demand of higher education’s institutions, ii) Students´ academic performance and, iii) relevance. We used a new database, which have been built from information reported by higher education institutions in the National Higher Education Information System (NHEIS), from the records of the Labor Observatory for Education (LOE) from National Education Ministry (NEM), Colombian Institution for Evaluation of the Education (CIEE) the Colombian Institute of Educational Credit and Technical Studies Abroad (CIECTSA) of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (NADS), to estimate a panel data model at the level of each dimension. 83 Colombians universities were taken into account, 31 of them have obtained the institutional accreditation during the period 2003 to 2015. The main results of this study suggest that the relation between institutional accreditation and the enrollment coverage for universities is positive for the levels of technological training programs, Masters Programs and PhD Programs. Accreditation is associated strong and positively with the students’ academic performance and with the recent graduates salaries increase, especially, for the levels of training in specialization and masters programs. However, to obtain an employment for graduates at undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels, accreditation does not seem to be relevant.