by Maria-Ligia Barbosa
In Latin America, higher education has undergone intense transformation. In the 1950s, there were around 700,000 students; by 1970 the number had increased to 1.9 million, reaching 8.4 million in 1990, 25 million students in 2011, and 30 million in 2019. HE systems in these countries vary greatly. There are countries like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay that are universalised (with a gross enrolment rate of over 60%), while countries like Brazil and Peru are going through the process of massification. The participation of the private sector is very uneven. Argentina and Uruguay have a high proportion of HE in the public sector, while Brazil, and Chile, conversely, have a predominance of enrolments in the private sector. Brazil and Chile opted to keep a relatively small and closed public system and open up space for the private sector. In Argentina and Uruguay, the demand for higher education was met by the public sector.
Latin American HE systems are organised, in general terms, into institutional types that distinguish university institutions from other non-university academic organisations. However, there are relevant differences in dimensions such as governance, size, selectivity and educational offer. Everywhere the university sector tends to have greater administrative and academic autonomy than its non-university counterpart, concentrates on offering long-term and academically oriented courses, and is more selective in academic and socioeconomic terms, as in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. On the other hand, non-university institutions concentrate on vocational or technical-professional courses, of short duration and teacher training, as in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, or are characterised by an offer focused mainly on teaching, with little involvement in research, as in Brazil.
Our group received a 2022 SRHE Research Award leading to a report: Measuring the relationship between institutional diversity and student equity in Latin America countries. The award enabled us to systematise information and analyse HE systems in the five Latin American countries mentioned above. From a conceptual point of view, we drew up a typology of higher education institutions and discussed it with experts.
A distinctive feature of this typology is the method by which it was constructed: different from what is usual in studies of this kind, we did not use administrative categories or theoretically discovered groups. In our analysis, the institutional types, or groups of institutions, arise from empirical data submitted to statistical procedures shown in the literature.
Following this approach, we found that in addition to the contrast between public and private higher education institutions (HEIs), the size of institutions influenced the dynamics of expansion. Notably, Brazil’s higher education system expanded by reducing institutional diversity and concentrating student enrolments. An example could be seen in the first group of HEIs that appeared in this analysis, with a strong enrolment concentration (88 private institutions enrolling 2,730,061 students) and the prevalence of online education. This increase in enrolments was balanced by a noticeable decline in enrolments at traditional and elite institutions.
Our findings suggest that other Latin American countries exhibit institutional patterns similar to that in Brazil. Each system is divided between universities, which tend to be more selective both socioeconomically and academically, and other institutions that focus on lower-prestige, short-term, non-university programs. Universities have an important organizational role in higher education and keep a high degree of legally defined autonomy.
On the other side, the institutional models chosen for teacher training play a key role in shaping differences between countries. The same can be said of the role of private sector that sets Brazil, Chile, and Peru apart from Argentina and Uruguay. However, this distinction is not absolute, as differences among the more privatised HE systems can be traced to the strength or weakness of regulatory institutions. A striking difference among these countries is the extent and role of distance education.
Brazil’s system, dominated by private institutions and heavily reliant on online courses, presents challenges for research into institutional diversity and modality of delivering higher education. The private HE sector in Brazil developed as part of the diversification associated with the first steps of enrolment expansion in the 1960s. However, in the 1990s, enrolment in the private HE sector in Brazil surpassed that of the public sector. The expansion of the private sector was encouraged by changes in education policy and the growth of the middle class, which began to demand more places in higher education. By 1995, enrolments in private institutions were already higher than in public ones, and this trend was consolidated in the following years. Distance learning has also grown exponentially, from 10 courses in 2000 to 10,534 in 2023. In that year, two thirds of the 4,983,992 first-year students opted for distance education, almost all of them (97 per cent) in private institutions.
These figures characterise the Brazilian HE system and have led to an intense political debate on the regulation of distance education and the quality of education in the private sector. In terms of research on institutional diversification, the formation of huge educational conglomerates that bring together very similar institutions seems to point to economic factors of isomorphism. It is possible to hypothesise that the institutional logic oriented towards market action is generalised in the private sector, crystallising an opposition to the logic prevailing in the public sector, which is more oriented towards academic agency. This opposition is emphasised in the more superficial political debate and obscures the subtleties and specificities of the process of diversified expansion of higher education. For example, the impossibility (human and geographical) of offering face-to-face courses in remote regions of the country. Or the possibility of producing innovation in public research universities in partnership with large technology companies.
Analysing the Brazilian case produced debate and made it possible to highlight some key issues for comparing the countries taking part in our project: the role of the university in higher education as a whole; the timing and speed of the expansion of HE; whether HE comprised one or several systems in each country; the different training paths, careers and types of degrees; the modality of delivery of HE; public or private funding of HE; the existence of institutions for the collection and dissemination of data.
We used the concept of institutional types to express the diverse reality of institutions in idealised typical forms – rational in their functioning and unilateral in defining the dominant feature. To organise this variety of elements in a coherent and compatible way we focused on the governance dimension of the higher education system. The concept of governance allows us to understand the logics of institutional functioning within the HE system and in national society. Governance models define the contours of HE systems, set up the role of the university, the types of careers and degrees, and the ways in which relevant data are collected and disseminated.
As there are several studies on the constituent elements of governance of higher education systems in the countries studied, we decided to sort this material by considering historical lines of their evolution. Starting with the creation of the first institutions, we studied the constitution of specific legislation, the process of expansion, the definition of purposes, the evolution of funding, structure, forms of supervision and evaluation.
The refinement of our conceptual tool (the typology of higher education institutions) highlighted these issues, directing our focus to the dimension of governance. Meanwhile a methodological problem appeared with great force: the different nomenclatures to name the processes, facts, agents and results of the functioning of HEIs in each country or group of countries. The simplest example is the term ‘licenciatura’ – difficult to translate into English – which in Argentina refers to graduates of the university system in the more traditional academic or professional careers, while in Brazil it only designates teacher training at university level.
An initial aggregation of what we already know can be seen in the table below. It was drawn up through dozens of meetings and on the basis of the available literature and that produced by the group’s researchers, as well as official data provided on the websites of ministries of education. As is easy to see, this is still scattered information that needs a more refined conceptual treatment.
To make any kind of comparison between HE structures in different countries it is necessary to analyse them carefully, based on an in-depth understanding of each country’s reality. Each object of interest or each dimension of the institutional typology unfolds into a research question to be analysed in detail.
Our study has provided important tools for analysing fundamental issues, relevant for informing public policies and the actions of public or private institutional leaders. We offer socially and historically informed answers to questions about what higher education is, and what and whom it is for in different countries.
And this is just the beginning: our project includes stages for analysing the efficiency and equity of the different ways of organising higher education. It envisages understanding how higher education impacts on graduates’ careers, on their professional destinies. At the same time, it strives for explaining the extent to which the impacts of higher education are independent of the social origin, gender or race of the students.
Maria-Ligia Barbosa is Associate Professor of Sociology/LAPES/PPGSA/UFRJ, in the LAPES Laboratory for Research on Higher Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and holder of the Carlos Hasenbalg Chair/CELAPES/CBAE/UFRJ. http://lattes.cnpq.br/5436482713562659 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7922-8643
This article represents the hard work of the LAPES team: André Pires, André Vieira, Leonardo Rodrigues and Renato Santos. I thank each and every one of them and take full responsibility for any mistakes. More information about our team and our work on our trilingual website: https://www.celapes.org/en
