The Chilean education system is split between the public and private sectors, inducing persistent inequality. Students from public secondary schools benefit from fewer opportunities than those from private schools, particularly in regard to acceptance rates at traditional universities. Acceptance at traditional universities is conditional on passing a selection test. In this regard, private secondary school graduates outperform their public-school peers. However, businesses prefer to hire students from traditional universities rather than private universities. Due to the high costs of private education and to the quality gap between public and private education at primary and secondary levels, students from poor households find themselves at a disadvantage when applying to traditional universities. In this thesis, we study three kind of policies that facilitate access to private schools or aim to improve the quality of public education, allowing equal opportunities for all students to enter into traditional universities. The policies analyzed are: i) an increase in subsidies granted to private schools, ii) a decrease of the consumer price of public education services and iii) an increase in current expenditures in public education services.In the first chapter, we use a static computable general equilibrium model which takes into account the segmentation of the education market between public and private sectors. We present the behaviours in the education market in terms of the demand and production of education services by level of education (primary, secondary and tertiary). Labour supply is exogenous and is specified according to skills (diplomas) and type of education (public or private). The simulation results show that a policy of increased subsidies granted to private primary and secondary schools facilitates access to private primary and secondary schools. Conversely, an increase in current expenditures in public education services restricts access to private schools. A reduction in the consumer price of public education services renders the different sectors of education more competitive with one another. In addition, unemployment decreases significantly with a policy of higher current expenditures granted to public education services.The model presented in the second chapter is a dynamic extension of the model used in the first chapter, taking into account two new indicators. Household demand for public and private education services depends on relative prices and on an indicator for relative quality of education. The human capital formation indicator varies according to real investments made in each level and type of education. In this chapter, labour supply is exogenous. We focus on the impacts of each policy on sectoral productivity, growth and unemployment. Depending on the targets pursued by the government, policy can be chosen to induce high levels of growth at the expense of a rising unemployment (increased subsidies granted to private schools) or a policy which reduces unemployment and which generates lower, but still substantial, levels of growth (improvement of the quality of public education by increased public expenditures into public education services).