¿Ampliación de las oportunidades en la educación superior o democratización? Cuatro experiencias en América Latina

Abstract

In this essay, we will analyze the expansion of the opportunities for enrollment in Higher Education that have been taking place over the last decades in Latin America. This is a subject that becomes very important because of the critical social inequality that characterizes the region. Although that expansion is a necessary condition it doesn’t assure the democratization of the third educational level. Nevertheless, this gap is not often recognized by the different social perspectives of analysis. With this scope, in first time, we’ll revise the theoretical discussion that, especially with the contribution of the French sociology, tries to understand the complexities and different shades of this concept. In this sense, although the enlargement of the access to Higher Education supposes always a kind of democratization, it doesn’t cancel previous exclusion or implies similar opportunities of success in the academic institutions for different social groups. That is why a restrictive definition of democratization must emphasize the decrease of the social inequalities, a process that not always joins the expansion of opportunities. On the other hand, we’ll make an analysis of the different modalities that this policy, with the same goals, adopts in four different countries (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela). This analysis will let us acknowledge not only the national aspects of this issue but also what are the ranges and limits of these democratization policies in each of the countries discussed