Researches on the effects of neoliberalization of public higher education in Latin America

Abstract

This article reviews the literature published between 1995 and 2019 addressing the effects of neoliberal policies being implemented in Latin American public higher education. It accounts for the ways university budget cuts as well as adopting performance evaluation systems resulted in defunding institutions and made professor posts precarious, which harmfully affected education. It is underlined that the imposition of these policies has faced resistance from social movements, and were also resisted by creating institutions with pedagogical principles other than the neoliberal ones. Selecting the literature presented was carried out by searching databases for the terms Neoliberalism and Latin America, Neoliberalism and University and Latin America, Neoliberalism and Higher Education and Latin America, in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. While revising the works, which includes articles, book chapters, books, dissertations, and web pages, the major discussion and results of each work were identified and systematized. Subsequently, the main themes highlighted by the authors were established. The conclusion found was the necessity of new qualitative studies, which would lead to an in-depth understanding how neoliberalism was intersected in particular ways with certain social categories in order to shape the experiences of people inside the universities.