Research Article An Unintended Effect of Financing the University Education of the Most Brilliant and Poorest Colombian Students: The Case of the Intervention of the Ser Pilo Paga Program Pablo Medina , 1,2 Natalia Ariza, 2 Pablo Navas, 2,3 Fernando Rojas, 2,4 Gina Parody, 2 Juan Alejandro Valdivia, 1,2,5 Roberto Zarama, 2,6 and Juan Felipe Penagos 2,6 1 Departamento de F´ ısica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile 2 CeiBA Complexity Research Center, Bogot´ a, Colombia 3 President, Universidad de los Andes, Bogot´ a, Colombia 4 Fondo de Financiamiento de Infraestructura Educativa, Ministerio de Educaci´ on Nacional, Bogot´ a, Colombia 5 Center for Development of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (CEDENNA), Santiago, Chile 6 Departamento de Ingenier´ ıa Industrial, Universidad de los Andes, Bogot´ a, Colombia Correspondence should be addressed to Pablo Medina; pab-medi@uniandes.edu.co Received 29 June 2018; Accepted 1 November 2018; Published 2 December 2018 Academic Editor: Guido Caldarelli Copyright © 2018 Pablo Medina et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In this paper, we show an unintended efect of the program Ser Pilo Paga (SPP) that was a fagship program of the Colombian government between 2014 and 2018. It was designed as an intervention in the Colombian Higher Education System (CHES) by awarding, in the steady state, individual funding to about 40,000 students. Every year, 10,000 new students were chosen from the best applicants in the top decile of the population in the entrance exam to higher education in Colombia that also came from families that live under the level of poverty according to a national survey. Our approach, based on an intensive study of the changes in the statistical distributions of the exam scores during these four years, provides evidence of student performance improvements not only of the benefciaries of the program, but also of the whole student population. Tis shows that the program opened similar opportunities for all the students, especially for the poorest ones. Te program drove a reduction in the gap between students of the upper strata of the population and those of the lowest strata that usually did not access a high quality institution of higher education due to the lack of funding. Tis result has opened a debate about the optimal way of funding higher education. 1. Introduction In October 2014, the President of Colombia announced the program Ser Pilo Paga (SPP for the Spanish acronym) (the name of the program uses the Colombian adjective “pilo” that denotes a particular characteristic of a person, which will be explained later in the introduction). SPP is one of the programs designed and implemented by the Minister of Education (Gina Parody, coauthor of this paper) to contribute to the objective of turning the country into the most educated country in Latin America by 2025. SPP focuses on a specifc group of academically high achievers that had no access to a higher education due to their low income [1–3]. In this manuscript, we report an unintended efect in the Colombian education system that was produced by this program. As we will analyze below, the SPP program has had some direct and some indirect efects in the Colombian Higher Education System (CHES), such as a clear improve- ment in the results of the entrance examination to the CHES, not only of the SPP students, but also of the whole student population. SPP is the result of a previous research, conducted by the authors of this article, that concluded with the design and implementation of the program. Te design of the program articulates eforts from the following four institutions of the Colombian system: (i) the Colombian agency (ICETEX) Hindawi Complexity Volume 2018, Article ID 3528206, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3528206