International Higher Education # 32:10

IHE devotes a column in each issue to a contribution from PROPHE, the Program for Research on Private Higher Education, headquartered at the University at Albany. See <http://www.albany.edu/~prophe>.

Chile has been both an early example and a patent case of a transition from a predominantly public to a primarily private, market-coordinated, system of higher education. Higher education was privatized and de-regulated, and competition imposed upon institutions. The creation of new private institutions was authorized in 1981, under a very lax licensing system. Public universities (including, among them, the publicly subsidized private universities created prior to these reforms, the "old" privates) were required to charge tuition, and engage in other revenue generating endeavors as public funding for higher education fell 40 percent between 1981 and 1990. What public funding remained would be, increasingly, distributed competitively.

Twenty years after Chilean higher education was reformed, "privateness" has come to be its dominant feature, with the private sector representing 93 percent of institutions, and 71 percent of enrollments. Non-public sources account for some 3/4 of the total national higher education expenditure. All these figures set Chile among the world's leaders in private participation in tertiary education. Chilean higher education is extolled as a model, especially by the World Bank, and not only for Latin America.

Just as 20 years ago the homogeneity between public and private sectors of higher education made Chile anomalous in Latin America, today many of the features of Chilean higher education stand in contrast to common features of private higher education in the region and in other developing countries. Foremost is the presence of genuine academic work in the new private university sector.

Familiar patterns of the private sector
The Chilean private tertiary sector conforms to much of what accumulating research on Latin American and global private higher education shows: proliferating private institutions unengaged in conventional academic ends, part-time and poorly qualified instructors, weak admission and promotion standards, inadequate infrastructure, poor libraries, and programs concentrated in inexpensive fields.

Compared to Chile's public universities, the repertoire of functions is narrower in privates, devoted to teaching or training as their main activity. There are no research universities among the new private universities, and they won't come close to such a definition at least for many years.

Also, governance is more hierarchical, and less participatory in privates, where the most powerful central administrations are found. Their authority is the greatest in institutions devoted only to teaching, where no critical masses of full-time faculty exist that could slice off a piece of control, or support a stronger leadership role on the part of a dean.

More than diploma mills
Yet, twenty years or less after their creation, some Chilean new private universities could boast teaching hospitals, doctoral programs in the natural sciences, and full-time researchers in Law and Business Administration. Although Chile's private institutions, like counterparts in Latin America, rely primarily on part time faculty, 30 percent of their professors are full or half-time, a datum that compares favorably with the public sector in much of Latin America; and the figure shows a consistent upwards trend. A funding model based almost solely on tuition is at the base of this staffing pattern, which forces privates to be very selective in hiring full-timers. Indeed, the composition of Chilean faculty by degree type shows public and private universities to be rather close in faculty with graduate degrees (public 34 percent, private 28 percent).

Whereas many private universities in Chile do not diverge much from the diploma mill stereotype, others combine commercial pursuits with reasonable (not leading) academic pursuits. And those with a truly serious academic profile should give pause to those who reject private institutions and privatization wholesale.

Also remarkable is that private universities have achieved some measure of academic competence with little more than the resources they can muster from tuition and other private sources of funding, challenging the notion, consistent with most international experience, that public funds are indispensable for the "higher" academic functions of research, graduate education, and other forms of production of public goods. Certainly, public money helps considerably, and in Chile too publicly subsidized universities perform the bulk of those functions, but apparently much can be done in the absence of subsidies.

Although private universities in Chile do exhibit the narrower scope of mission, function, clientele, participatory governance, accountability, and finance, that the literature identifies as characteristic of private educational institutions and sectors worldwide, they are not by any means a marginal academic appendix to the public sector. They compete with the more established institutions on many fronts, and some even surpass public universities in prestige, and quality of their student bodies, as measured by rankings and tests scores, respectively.

No wonder, then, that we see many instances of private universities becoming models for public universities, and not just in finance, but also in management, reliance on part-time faculty, and in extensive use of incentives for salary differentiation, as perhaps the three most conspicuous examples.

From a policy perspective, the fact that the strengthening of the academic profession in the last two decades and the development of research and graduate programs should have taken place in Chile while at the same time the tertiary system, fueled by private sector growth, more than doubled in enrollments in fifteen years, the system became dominantly private in institutional make-up, enrollments, and funding, and the institutions were forced to compete with each other, stands out as an intriguing exception to the decline of social services and public goods usually associated with privatization and market competition. Government policy, consistent with Chile's overall economic model, has made its contribution too, as funding for research, granted on a competitive, peer reviewed basis, has increased fourfold since the early eighties, graduate programs are accredited under demanding standards, and performance indicators rewarding faculty credentials and scientific output influence the distribution of public funds. Overall, however exceptional it may be, Chile's experience suggests that private initiative and market competition, far from inevitably antithetical to academic development, can under certain conditions actually foster it.