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INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

Costa Rica: Public Continuity, Private Gains

Daniel C. Levy
Daniel C. Levy is Distinguished Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY, and is director of PROPHE. Address: Department of Educational Administration & Policy Studies, SUNY-Albany. Address: Education Building, SUNY at Albany, Albany, NY 12222, USA. E-mail: dlevy@uamail.albany.edu.

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

Costa Rica's private-sector higher education, though Latin America's second youngest, is now 30 years old. It encompasses some 50 institutions and 80,000 enrollments. Striking is how much Costa Rican public higher education has maintained its standing, even as it has lost its enrollment share. As was the case in the 1970s, there are still only four public universities (apart from a distance university). The four continue to be led by the University of Costa Rica, in essence the national university. Despite a movement in the 1970s to build regional campuses of the public universities, the lack of public university proliferation is unusual for Latin America. It has allowed comparatively uniform quality and at a rather high level. Recent surveying shows that 85 percent of secondary school graduates prefer to attend public rather than private universities. Even the public technical university draws on private secondary schools (generally advantaged) for the majority of its entrants.

Public universities have also maintained an unusual degree of autonomy—a lack of accountability, in the view of critics. There are interuniversity regulatory bodies, but the public universities basically run themselves. At the same time, the universities have undertaken more reforms than many of their regional counterparts. A major example is tuition and other measures that introduce some privateness. Also, there is government funding of student loans, the majority of which involve the private higher education sector, due to its size and the level of tuition charges. Government subsidies given directly to institutions are only for public universities.

In part because the public sector has adapted and to a larger extent because it maintains enviable quality and has not pursued either huge expansion or the leftist activism characteristic of the 1970s, Costa Rica has escaped some of the public-private clashes seen in sister republics. On the other hand, formal public-private partnerships remain rare (though, as is common globally, private institutions hire, through part-time appointments, professors from the public institutions). In comparative terms, Costa Rica is noteworthy for the separateness and distinctiveness of the public and private sectors.

Private Gains: Quantitative
Given the ample public-sector continuity, probably higher education's most dramatic changes have come through the private sector. Twenty-five years ago, private enrollments were barely over 4,000, comprising 8 percent of the higher education total. The 20-fold private surge to the present, so impressive in the aggregate, is largely the product of a concentrated period, the 1990s—particularly the late 1990s.

Overall, the private growth is demand absorbing in that the effective yearning for higher education soared while the public sector remained exclusive. This pattern, first formidably shown in Latin America by Brazil, has become the region's dominant tendency in the last couple of decades, but it is sharp in Costa Rica. Unlike the situation in countries where the public sector lost its standing, in Costa Rica there has been little space in which to attempt to build private elite institutions. Additionally, the private sector's delayed start in Costa Rica meant that Latin America was already past its period of heavy establishment of Catholic universities. Costa Rica's private enrollments are overwhelmingly in secular institutions.

Consistent with typical demand-absorbing tendencies, the modal private institution specializes in job-oriented fields, often niche fields. Night classes are common. Major population centers are the typical sites. Many institutions are family owned. Many split off from the original private institution, the Autonomous University of Central America, whose founding and reigning philosophy was for a university composed ("Oxford-like") of constituent colleges, each with considerable autonomy. That very autonomy and separate ownership has in recent years allowed colleges to secede, defended in so doing by national court decisions. So, the proliferation of private institutions is perhaps less extensive than it at first appears to be. The expansion has come about more through the creation of parauniversities that offer more short-cycle options. Each parauniversity affiliates with a university, private to private, public to public. This differs from global examples in which short-cycle private institutions affiliate with public universities.

Perhaps the most striking private growth of the last several years involves for-profit institutions. Key is the entry of Laureate Education, formerly Sylvan Learning. Laureate has perhaps 85 percent of its global enrollments in the Americas, with Costa Rican neighbors including Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico.

Private Gains: Qualitative
Although for-profits are almost inevitably challenged for lacking academic quality, the seriousness of the Laureate undertaking can scarcely be questioned. The administration is professional, and a premium is placed on client services and satisfaction as well as, relatedly, business ties (as with Microsoft). Laureate is selective regarding the institutions in which it invests. No secret is made of the profit motive, yet Laureate in Costa Rica also claims a mission of academic seriousness reaching all the way to top-level teaching staff and research.

A more generalized phenomenon affecting private-sector quality and standing is accreditation. This is a concern at the multicampus Universidad Latina (the country's largely private university), the Iberoamericana, and others. Many private institutions are engaged in forms of self-evaluation. As is commonly the case regarding accreditation for private higher education institutions, the upside concerns quality, status, and legitimacy—each in turn potentially enhancing marketability. Another hope is that accreditation can enlarge the scope of autonomy.

A common private-sector complaint concerns how many measures require external (often slow) approval. UNIRE, formed in 1995, is an association of private universities (approximately 40 of the country's 50), which sees its present role largely in terms of protecting its members from a heavy state hand. Another private-sector concern involves the difficulty of meeting accreditation standards, particularly if they derive from conventional academic indicators favored by established public universities. The accreditation route also involves financial costs for the institutions.

A variety of private institutions, not usually included in aggregate higher education data, would show a yet more robust private sector in both quantitative and qualitative terms. There are institutions concerned with applied research and other institutions—atypical in formation, finance, and governance—with specialized teaching functions, as in agriculture.

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