LATIN AMERICAN CENTER OF
RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION
The project
Brazilian and international researchers came together to discuss how institutional models of higher education in Latin America are associated with distinct patterns of expansion, diversification and democratization.
Institutional Forms of Higher Education in Latin America
The project aims to analyze Higher Education (HE) policies in Latin America, establishing the main characteristics of institutional models in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. This research, which is financed by SRHE, CNPq and Faperj, aims to characterize the expansion of HE in these countries, indicating institutional variability, the types of diploma offered, the valued careers or knowledge, the processes of reproduction of elites and access patterns, completion and graduate outcomes.
Although the expansion of higher education is a general phenomenon, in recent decades, each national system has carried out in its own way - and with different timings - an increase in the number of its institutions, courses and HE students. In this study, the research question is to understand how these ES expansion processes that have occurred in the region have been facing two challenges: on the one hand, including groups of young people who are traditionally excluded – due to inequalities of gender, social class, ethnicity, color, etc. of higher education in their respective countries; and, on the other, reproduce and/or renew its elites within expanded and supposedly more democratic higher education systems.
Our hypothesis is that SES institutional models express social forces and collective agency, configuring different levels of system openness. The aim is to institutionalize an articulation of research networks on HE in Latin America and contribute to the process of training public and private managers of HE systems. As results, we will produce analyzes of the different expansion policies of the systems considered and form a network of higher education institutions and researchers in Latin America and also offer training courses for managers.
