This dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the Chilean higher education system and policies over the period 1967-2007. It focuses on the creation, development and working of higher education... Show moreThis dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the Chilean higher education system and policies over the period 1967-2007. It focuses on the creation, development and working of higher education markets and policies. The approach employed is shared with other recent specialized market studies of terciary education, a field which has been formed academically during the last twenty years, based on the contributions of the organizational sociology of universities and the analysis of the political economy of markets. During this period, Chilean higher education unfolded in a changing political environment which is represented in this study by four episodes: first, the 1967 university reform, unleashed by the system__s own institutions, principally students; second, the intervention of universities in 1973 by the military government; third, the installation, by the same government, of a market policy for terciary education beginning in 1981; and last, the changes that have occurred since the recuperation of democracy in 1990. Each of these episodes illustrates a particular and specific form of organizing relations between the state and the higher education system; these are analyzed from the point of view of how the system__s coordination was structured with the shifting participation of government policies, institutional interests and market forces. Show less
