On 4 November 2026, affiliated PhD candidate Juan Gabriel Malagon Gonzalez successfully defended his PhD thesis

The PhD thesis is entitled:

“Beyond the Frontier: Rigor, Representation, and Analytics in Educational Efficiency”

This thesis asked whether the evidence used to judge how well schools turn resources into results can be trusted, and how that evidence can be improved.

The literature reviews that policymakers and researchers rely on turn out to be systematically biased and largely impossible to reproduce: They overlook studies published in other languages or outside traditional journals, and they present findings from rich countries as generally valid while framing research from other regions as merely local.

Removing those blind spots brings a rich body of Latin American and Caribbean research into view.

The thesis further shows that the statistical method most often used to compare schools becomes unreliable when many resources are measured at once, wrongly labeling almost every school as efficient.

Using a modern way of simplifying complex information, it builds a better method and applies it to more than eleven thousand Colombian secondary schools, showing that schools can succeed in different ways.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Carla Haelermans, Prof. Dr. Alexander Grigoriev

Click here for the full dissertation.