Neoliberalism and Higher Education in Latin America

• Author: Bernadete Beserra,Robert Austin Henry
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221084299
• Subject Matter: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221084299

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 244, Vol. 49 No. 3, May 2022, 3–17

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221084299

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

3

Introduction

Neoliberalism and Higher Education in Latin America

by

Robert Austin Henry and Bernadete Beserra

Since the globalization of the neoliberal economic model began during the

1980s, higher education systems have entered a phase of accelerated mercanti-

lization throughout much of Latin America. Yarzábal (2001) argues that the

militarized destruction of liberation movements during the 1970s and 1980s

allowed the architects of neoliberalism in Latin America to impose a model of

“oligarchic democracy,” which marginalized social justice, progressively debil-

itated sovereignty, and reduced popular participation to periodic voting in for-

mal elections for government. Such regimes became conduits for slashing

public funds for state universities, introducing tuition fees, facilitating the pro-

liferation of private higher education institutions linked to speculative capital,

fortifying elitist institutions, and abandoning to educational markets the state’s

historic responsibility for evaluating and accrediting the new institutions.

Under the promise of democratization of access to higher education for the

massses, governments and education corporations on a worldwide scale have

transformed an area that was a state responsibility for much of the twentieth

century into one more frontier for the expansion of corporate capital and accu-

mulation of private wealth. A child of colonial expansion, the modern Latin

American university has always been dependent on the international division

of labor. But under neoliberalism it has become a mechanism for an ever-grow-

ing transfer of profits from the poorest to the richest countries rather than an

institution committed to the production of knowledge to enrich citizenship and

democracy. This mechanism works indirectly—in Mexico, for instance, by add-

ing a tertiary layer to education in consumerism and so-called poverty allevia-

tion promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the

Inter-American Development Bank, and the G-20 (Soederberg, 2014: 168–191)—

or directly, through, for instance, the proliferation of courses offered by local

chapters of finance industry and resource transnationals or the transfer of rent

and technology from Latin American higher education institutions to metro-

politan ones, all of which ultimately deepens dependency and strengthens

Robert Austin Henry is an honorary associate in the history department at the University of

Sydney, coeditor (with Joana Salém and Viviana Canibilo Ramírez) of La vía chilena al socialismo:

50 años después (2020), and a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives. Bernadete Beserra

is an associate editor of the journal, a professor of education at the Universidade Federal do Ceará,

and the author (with Rémi Fernand Lavergne) of Racismo e edução no Brasil (2018). The collective

thanks them for organizing this issue.

1084299LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221084299Latin American PerspectivesAustin and Beserra/Introduction

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