International
Higher Education, Spring 1999
Second-Generation
Reforms in Chile
Andrés Bernasconi
Andrés Bernasconi served as director of studies of the Consejo superior
de educación in Chile. He is now program coordinator for Latin American
programs at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Address: 339 Gutman
Library, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-Mail: <bernasan@gse.harvard.edu>.
Chile has recently
committed U.S.$241 million over the next five years to launch its second wave
of higher education reforms in two decades. The new policy package, supported
by the World Bank, builds upon the reforms of the early 1980s, furthering transformations
that proved successful, fixing what failed to achieve its intended results, and
adding new dimensions to the reform effort. This case of second-wave reforms,
unique in Latin America, can provide something of the benefit of hindsight to
countries in the region now embarking on first-generation transformations.
What I call here
first-generation reforms are those crystallized in the "Washington consensus"
of the multilateral donor institutions, and advocated by reformers everywhere
in Latin America.1 The reform
program includes:
- cost recovery
in public universities through tuition fees and diversification of funding
sources (presently, most Latin American public universities are free to everyone,
regardless of socioeconomic status);
- government
funding sensitive to institutional performance;
- rewards for
good faculty performance and disincentives against mediocre work, as opposed
to the seniority-based rule of homologación or isonomía,
prevalent in the region's public institutions, which requires everybody to
be paid the same regardless of academic productivity;
- evaluation
systems aimed at fostering accountability and improving quality;
- strengthening
of vocational training;
- institutional
diversification (i.e., diverse types of institutions serving different educational
missions); and
- privatization,
both in the sense of allowing for private provision of postsecondary education,
and of increasing private-sector contributions to higher education funding.
Nowhere in Latin America
has this reform agenda been more thoroughly implemented than in Chile.2
In fact, Chilean reforms of the early 1980s predate the "Washington consensus"
by a good decade, and have substantially contributed to giving form and a veneer
of plausibility to the reform program for the rest of the region. Starting in
1981, Chile privatized its higher education, in both senses of the word: in 1996
there were 242 private and 25 public institutions, with private enrollments at
63 percent of the total, and only one-third of the budgets of public institutions
came from government appropriations.3
New legislation allowed postsecondary education to diversify into three tiers
(universities, professional institutes, and technical training centers) and stimulated
the growth of the vocational training sector, so that by 1996 one-third of all
postsecondary students were attending nonuniversity technical or professional
programs. The government has experimented with performance- and contract-based
funding, and it lets universities regulate personnel issues (within the limits
of the civil service nature of jobs in public institutions). While public university
tuition levels match those of private institutions, financial aid is available
in the form of scholarships and loans. Finally, an accreditation system was established
in 1990.
After almost two
decades of reform, Chilean higher education scores high relative to Latin America
in efficiency, coverage, overall quality of teaching, research productivity,
institutional diversification, and evaluation. However, despite successes in
many areas, some difficulties remain, and the first wave of reforms has added
some others of its own.
Vocational education
is one of the major problems not satisfactorily addressed by the reforms of
the 1980s. While private provision caused the number of programs and students
to soar, the government neglected to regulate this sector and to invest in it,
leaving its development entirely to the dynamics of the market. As a result,
quality became a serious concern, and a regressive pattern evolved in which
public funding and financial aid are available to universities and their middle-class
students but not to vocational training schools and their lower-class clientele.
The new reform effort will tackle both problems by making public funding available
and setting up accreditation mechanisms for quality control and improvement.
Most of current
initiatives, however, endeavor to correct problems raised by the previous reform
itself. Cost recovery has put great pressure on public universities to survive
in a competitive market environment, eroding their capacity to capitalize and
produce scholarship in fields unattractive to private customers. Differentiation
has widened the variation in quality standards across institutions in ways that
defeat the streamlining powers of the accreditation system. There is very little
systemwide coordination across the three types of institutions and within them.
Finally, the system is plagued with market failures--the full array of them,
in textbook-like purity and abundance, from externalities to information asymmetries--which
are bad enough in a system of mixed state and market regulation, but outright
devastating in the Chilean context of an absentee state.
Proposed remedial
measures include:
- strengthening
public funding for the improvement of teaching, research, and training of
researchers, via competitive mechanisms and contracts;
- complementing
the current institutional accreditation system with a national program evaluation
scheme; and
- improving the
capacity of public agencies to coordinate the higher education system.
The unifying motive
behind the new batch of reforms appears to be reclaiming a role for the state
in the regulation of the higher education system, after the disorderly retreat
of the 1980s. The market will remain the main mechanism for coordination, but
the government will assume a much more active role in ensuring the production
of public goods, setting standards for quality and monitoring their application,
disseminating information, defining priorities for the allocation of funds, and
ensuring that institutional commitments are honored. In a word, the state will
do more to assure the accountability of the system and its component institutions
to their various constituencies.
In pursuing this
course, Chile will not only alter the trajectory of the reforms of the 1980s,
but will continue to steer away from the legacy of an earlier reform that started
in 1918 in Cordoba, Argentina, and later spread to the rest of Latin America,
disseminating the fateful principles and practices of cogovernance and autonomy.
According to the first, governance was to be shared in equal parts by students,
faculty, and alumni (later administrators) in everything from the election of
the rector and other authorities to the minutia of day-to-day administration--a
concoction that ended up generating participatory institutional deadlock. Autonomy
called for complete freedom from governmental intervention in university affairs,
together with full public funding, a formula that succeeded in ensuring university
self-determination at the cost of turning them into solipsistic institutions
isolated from external constituencies and accountable only to themselves.
Cogovernance was
wiped off the Chilean institutional landscape in 1973 by the military dictatorship,
and it has not been reintroduced since the redemocratization of the country
in 1990. There is a wide consensus that everybody is better off without it.
The traditional concept of autonomy, on the other hand, was shattered--first,
by military intervention, and, second, by overexposure to the market. The challenge
for second-generation reforms is to define a new concept of autonomy adequate
to deal with the requirements of accountability championed by the state and
the struggle for survival imposed by the market.
Notes
- Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB), Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean:
A Strategy Paper. No. EDU-101 (Washington, D.C.: 1DB, 1997); World Bank,
Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (Washington, D.C.: World
Bank, 1994).
- José
Joaquín Brunner and Guillermo Briones, "Higher Education in Chile:
Effects of the 1980 Reform," in Higher Education Reform in Chile, Brazil
and Venezuela: Toward a Redefinition of the Role of the State, ed. Laurence
Wolff and Douglas Albrecht (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1992).
- Corporación
de promoción (CPU), Informe sobre la educación superior en
Chile, 1996 (Santiago: CPU, 1996).