Myth, Reality and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America
by Mark J. Drozdowski
Contrary to a narrowly held belief, people in Latin America don’t speak Latin. If you’re so inclined, however, you could study the dead language at one of the region’s colleges and universities, the subject of Myth, Reality and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America.
A product of editors Claudio de Moura Castro and Daniel C. Levy, the book was published in 1999 by the Inter-American Development Bank and distributed via Johns Hopkins University
Press. I use the term “book” loosely here; the text is all of 105 pages. Myth reads as more of a strategy document or white paper treatise.
And it reads fairly well. Once I fought my way past the opening sentence (“Two debilitating tendencies dominate assessments of the state of higher education in Latin America.”), I found a nicely presented analysis of a topic with which I had little familiarity.
As the title suggests, the authors aim to dispel several myths surrounding higher education in the region. Primarily, their concern involves conventional wisdoms postulating either that institutions in Latin America display high quality and need little reform or, conversely, that the system is a mess and requires radical changes.
The book begins by presenting a statistical portrait of Latin-American higher education. Enrollments have grown dramatically in recent years, swelling to almost 10 million students. As of 1994 (the authors offer some dated numbers), 493 of the region’s 812 universities were private, but public institutions enrolled 60 percent of the students.
Attendance rates vary from a low of 10.6 percent in Honduras to a high of 38.9 percent in Argentina (those data are from 1993). Latin America, in fact, leads the developing world in this regard, with roughly one in five of the age cohort enrolled. It also promotes gender equality. More than half of the student population is female; by the late 1990s, women constituted roughly 40 percent of the professorate. As is common throughout the world, higher
education in Latin America provides an avenue for social mobility. Graduates have lower rates of unemployment and earn more than those without a college education.
Despite these positive indicators, higher education in the region suffers from what the authors term “severe shortcomings.” They cite “widespread disrepair, plagued by crises of legitimacy, ill-defined labor markets for graduates, and damaging social and political confrontations.” Purported champions of their cause, the authors nonetheless submit brutal assessments.
Here’s a sampling:
“Most institutions that are called
universities are only weakly linked
with excellence.”“True research in the sense of
original work is very rare.”“Concern over egregiously low
quality is warranted ….”“Some universities are just bad
institutions; some are glorified high
schools.”
Other deficiencies plague the system: a lack of institutional planning, management, and accountability. The authors reveal “rote learning, outdated curricula, lack of pedagogical materials, and laxity in access to and passage through the system.” Technological advancements are nil. The region displays a “cultural
indifference to science and research.” Too many students never
graduate.
Problems stem largely from the explosive growth that occurred in the post-war period. Essentially, higher education expanded much faster than the supply of well-prepared faculty and administrators.
Nonetheless, the authors remain positive, attempting to focus more on improvement than on blame. Their prescriptions emanate from a new typology they’ve devised, centered on four institutional functions: academic leadership, professional development, technological training and development, and general higher education. Universities can and often do perform more than one function.
Academic leadership involves prestigious undergraduate education, cutting-edge research, top students and faculty, and the production of “cultural leaders.” Unfortunately, the region supports few examples of this model.
Professional development prepares students for specific career
tracks in well-defined professions such as law, medicine, and engineering. Like academic leadership, professional development is not for the masses.
Technological training and development, fairly new, provides specific skills for professional pursuits such as tourism, management, or accounting.
General higher education serves as a catchall category encompassing what’s left. This largest segment, in terms of student numbers, is “nonspecified,” according to the authors. It does not involve research but features “quasi-professional” training and character-building curricula. I found this element of the typology
the least well defined.
Using this typology, the authors examine key policy issues, including public subsidization; incentives, finance and governance; and tools for quality enhancement and control. Among their chief recommendations is a call for major public subsidies for higher education, especially for those few “academic leadership” institutions. “No country that wants significant research,” they assert, “can expect students to pay for it.”
The book also dwells for some time on accreditation. Here the authors present mixed messages. They reject institutional accreditation as a control mechanism for any function except general higher education. That sector, they say, needs accreditation
standards because it exhibits low quality and confusion. Shying
away from the “U.S. model” for accreditation, they argue that it “makes little sense for the accreditation process to focus on institutions that lack academic and administrative coherence.”
Perhaps such imposed standards would provide an opportunity to achieve that coherence.
They also suggest that, for the other functions, accreditation should apply to the program level rather than the institutional level. “In the U.S.,” the authors claim, “only dismal institutions fail to get institutional accreditation, but many professional development programs cannot meet the accrediting standards of their professional associations.” That much is largely true. Take education and law schools, for instance. The National Council for
Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is the largest
accrediting body for schools of education, but the top four “Ed” schools as ranked by U.S. News and World Report — Harvard, Stanford, Columbia’s Teachers College, and UCLA — are not members, not that lacking such a credential diminishes their academic reputations. Yet failing to receive ABA accreditation would be anathema to a law school, especially one with national standing.
Most notably, the authors reject the notion that accreditation
should inform academic leadership institutions. “Imposed criteria can undercut the autonomy and academic freedom needed for exploration and excellence,” they claim. Instead, they suggest for this function a “nonintrusive” accreditation that provides an “occasion for self-study.” Keeping aside the obvious concern that
top programs are somehow above evaluation, a simple question arises: how could an accrediting body assess some functions and not others when they are intertwined on the same campus and even within programs? The intersection of the authors’ typology and accreditation arguments fails to achieve clarity, perhaps demonstrating the limits of this new model.
The authors are not terribly optimistic about the possibility for significant reform. They claim the system “suffers from too few rewards for socially useful behavior and too few penalties for antisocial actions.” National policy fails to penalize institutions that perform poorly or reward institutions that perform well. Professors, they point out, can remain unprepared — even not show up for class — and avoid sanctions.
Standing in the way of progress is the region’s governance structure, a “bottom-heavy” model affording students almost as much clout as faculty and administrators. Despite a recent decrease in their collective strength, students still wield influence and remain a powerful lobby against academic reform.
All told, Myth provides an informative analysis of Latin-American higher education, albeit with limitations. The four-part typology, upon which the authors’ key observations rest, seems a useful tool despite its generalizations. I wish the authors had devoted some attention to faculty — particularly part-time professors (who comprise 60 percent of the professoriate) — and to campus level
activity. Instead, the approach here is systemic, broad. I recommend it chiefly to connoisseurs of comparative higher education.
