Diversity and Equity in Higher Education in Latin American Countries

DIVERSITY AND EQUITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES: ANALYTICAL PROPOSAL

Professor at IFNMG and researcher at CeLapes

One of the objectives of this project is to create a typology of higher education institutions (HEIs) based on how they operate in practice. In Brazil, the formal structure of this teaching stage already suggests some classifications of institutions. The type of administrative category, for example, separates public institutions from private institutions. The academic organization provides for the classification of institutions into Universities, University Centers and Colleges, in addition to Federal Institutes and Federal Technological Centers. But, if we look at how HEIs work, what type of classification do we find? What are the similarities and differences between the typology based on operation and the one legally foreseen? Based on these questions, our analytical proposal intends to group institutions based on operating characteristics.

MOTIVATIONS

The growing institutional diversification of higher education systems has motivated efforts aimed at understanding how institutions effectively operate, beyond normative or legal classifications. (Munoz, 2013; Brunner, 2009; Huisman et al. 2015)

The question of this research agenda can be summarized as follows: how are systems organized once the different profiles of institutions are considered, defined and measured in a multidimensional way?"

The institutional diversification agenda takes on its own contours in Brazil, due to the reconfiguration of higher education provision guided by a high degree of virtualization concentrated on low and medium return courses offered in for-profit HEIs.

The specific questions that guide this project, which aims to build a typology of the higher education system that allows understanding how the system is actually structured and supports decision-making on institutional regulation and evaluation.

● How can higher education institutions be classified based on different institutional dimensions?

● How is this organization associated with the inclusion of new groups of students?

● To what extent can we compare the Brazilian system with similar systems in Latin America and the Global South?

PROCEDURES

CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS AND SELECTION OF INDICATORS

● Birnbaum (1983): characteristics of HEIs in terms of: administrative dependence, academic organization, areas of concentration of knowledge, admission mechanisms, working conditions of the teaching staff.

● Diversity as an attribute of any system whose elements can be distributed into categories. Emphasis on the operational aspect: dispersion, distribution, etc. (Huisman (2015).

● Harris and Ellis (2020): description of the variety and categorization of HEIs into institutional types.

● The characteristics that differentiate HEIs inform their distinct institutional logics (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008; Frølich et al., 2013).

● Schwartzman, Silva Filho and Coelho (2021) describe institutional types based on pedagogical resources and characteristics of teachers and characteristics of undergraduate and postgraduate students.

SELECTION OF DATABASES AND VARIABLES

The first task is to identify which characteristics of HEIs we should consider for this classification. The specialized literature on the subject, in Brazil and other countries, indicates some main dimensions that characterize the functioning of institutions. From an extensive bibliographic review, we selected aspects related to six of these dimensions:

Governance
Teaching
Search
Extension
Inclusion Policies
Internationalization of HEIs.

These dimensions guided our look at the available public data and the selection of analysis variables. In practice, this means that, when looking at teaching staff, for example, it is important to select variables that indicate their role in academic management (governance), their education and work regime (teaching), whether and how they produce knowledge (research ) and what are its activities linked to the community in which it is located (extension). It is, therefore, a multidimensional approach to the functioning of institutions and the same exercise was carried out for the other information available for each HEI. In the first round of analysis we worked with around 60 indicators of the functioning of institutions.

● Data sources:

(1) Administrative data from the Brazilian Higher Education Census (2019).

(2) Tables of enrollment and academic production of postgraduate courses from the SCImago Journal Ranking and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).

ANALYTICAL STRATEGY

The second task is the classification of HEIs. It is an operational challenge to classify the almost 2600 Brazilian institutions based on a diverse set of characteristics. This would imply comparing them one by one based on each selected variable and then separating them into groups (which, a priori, we do not know how many there are or their sizes). To do this, we use a grouping technique (Latent Profile Analysis) that allows classifying HEIs into distinct profiles considering all the information provided. As it is a statistical approach, the technique provides us with parameters to decide the number of groups and the probability of each HEI participating in each group. The result of this analysis is the HEIs grouped into distinct institutional profiles, that is, a typology of higher education based on operating characteristics.

● Main hypothesis: There are relationships between different operating characteristics of institutions.

● Exploratory Factor Analysis:

○ Objective : find relationships underlying variables (dimensions).

○ Build a new set of variables, smaller than the original.

● Construction of typologies:

○ Do the dimensions found allow us to identify institutional types? What are the characteristics of these types?

○ To what extent do the institutional types found indicate system functioning dynamics?

INITIAL FINDINGS

Preliminary results confirm our hypothesis: formal classification tells only part of the story of the functioning of institutions.

In the groupings found, we identified which operational characteristics are capable of differentiating institutions within the same academic organization or type of management.

Some characteristics have proven to be more relevant in distinguishing institutions, such as size, the offer of extracurricular activities and the diversity in the offer of courses and academic degrees. Other characteristics reveal trends in the educational system in recent years, such as the offering of distance learning courses, which has proven to be an important factor in the grouping of institutions.

Although preliminary, the results indicate that the typology captures in an original way the complexity of the Brazilian higher education system, which has not yet been achieved by other theoretical approaches and analysis techniques. The typology can become an important reference for analyzes that seek to overcome, for example, the dichotomous classification between public and private systems. Furthermore, the results may contribute to debates about the differentiation of higher education organizations, their distinct functions and how we can evaluate them.