In recent years, the Peruvian state has allocated resources to a wide range of priorities, but scholarships for its best students have not been one of them. The recent announcement that nearly 300 young people admitted to the best universities in the world would be unable to apply for the 150 places that the program offers each year, added to the previous budget problems surrounding Beca 18, reveals the State’s priorities. This occurs in a context in which the Executive has committed close to S/20 billion in nine bailouts to Petro-Perú since 2022. Congress, for its part, has approved measures that would reduce collection by S/34,564 million and, in addition, has increased its own budget by an average of S/366 million annually above what was initially proposed by the MEF since 2022. Only the latest increase, equivalent to S/485 million, would have been enough to cover more than half of the budget deficit that Pronabec faces this year.
The Bicentennial Generation Scholarship (BGB) is, in this context, one of the smallest lines of the public budget, barely 0.028% of the annual Education budget, which in turn concentrates close to a fifth of the total public budget. However, since 2013, it has awarded 2,785 scholarships to Peruvian professionals with high academic performance and limited resources to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees in the 400 best universities in the world, under a commitment to return and professional service to the country, with an approximate cost of S/ 232 thousand for a master’s degree and S/ 411 thousand for a doctorate. Its magnitude is clear when compared to what Congress spends on payroll bonuses. Between 2021 and 2025, the BGB earned only S/ 45 million, three times less than the S/ 134 million that Congress assigns in a single year to the item where it records schooling, bonuses, gratuities, productivity bonus and economic growth bonus. Those S/ 134 million would have financed 580 master’s degrees or more than 320 doctorates abroad.
The BGB is one of the few public policies with a real capacity to sustainably transform the lives of Peruvians, given that it intervenes simultaneously in three dimensions: (i) the formation of advanced human capital, (ii) intergenerational social mobility, and (iii) the capacity of a country to multiply knowledge in new generations. By articulating these three dimensions, the scholarship contributes to improving labor supply, reducing poverty and increasing productivity in the long term.
Only the last increase, equivalent to S/485 million, would have been enough to cover more than half of the budget deficit that Pronabec faces this year.
On the one hand, the program contributes to closing the gap between the supply and demand of talent in the Peruvian labor market. Currently, nine out of ten companies report difficulties in finding workers with the qualifications they require, especially in information technologies, engineering and applied research. The scholarship holders are trained precisely in those disciplines, where the local offer is scarcer.
The scholarship is also one of the few real channels of intergenerational mobility that the Peruvian system offers. In fact, workers with a postgraduate degree receive incomes 63.5% higher than those who only completed an undergraduate degree and register an informal employment rate of 13.1%, less than half of the 31.2% observed among those who have completed a university education. In addition to the higher income that postgraduate workers receive, it must be taken into account that 70.5% of their beneficiaries come from public universities and 49.3% apply from outside Lima. In practice, the program funds the gap that separates talented low-income students from academic institutions of global excellence, a gap that the market does not solve on its own.
Additionally, the impact of the program does not end with the scholarship recipient. According to the most recent Pronabec study on return experiences, 75.9% of beneficiaries spend more time in Peru than abroad after completing the postgraduate degree. A relevant proportion also joins university teaching, multiplying the effect of public investment on new generations of talent. Taken together, this can contribute to raising the country’s productivity in the long term.
Every year that this investment is postponed, the country gives up a cohort of engineers, doctors, researchers and public servants trained at the highest level. It also renounces the chains that this training generates on the productivity and social mobility of families that cannot afford a postgraduate degree abroad. The Executive can still correct course: secure resources and prevent another group of students from being left out not due to lack of merit, but due to lack of political will.
