ISERP Highlights: Seed Grant "Empowering Access to Education with AI"
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The Project
With funding from ISERP’s seed grant program, Economics professor Sebastián Otero and his colleague, Stanford’s Claudia Allende, are studying the possible impact of AI on reducing barriers to educational access in Chile.
Throughout Latin America, public school applications are difficult for families with limited digital literacy, as they face complex online systems, information gaps, and administrative delays from overextended school staff. These barriers disproportionately affect marginalized groups and often hinder families’ ability to secure high-quality educational options for their children.
Through their partnerships with OpenAI, the Chilean Ministry of Education, and Tether—an ed-tech organization that manages school admissions and waitlists across Chile—Otero and Allende are working to develop and deploy an AI agent that provides school-specific information to families, real-time application tracking, automated application submission, and other supports.
The aim is to study the impacts of this AI agent in a Randomized Control Trial, assessing how the agent affects application processing, enrollment efficiency, and equity across socioeconomic and geographic lines.
The Researcher
Otero is an applied microeconomist who primarily focuses on structural changes in education markets with a special emphasis on Latin America. He joined Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2023, and he was named as a new Faculty Research Fellow at NBER in May 2025.