Costa Rica: Public Continuity, Private Gains

Abstract

IHE devotes a column in each issue to a contribution from PROPHE, the Program for Research on Private Higher Education, headquartered at the University of Albany. See http://www.albany.edu/. Costa Rica’s private-sector higher education, though Latin America’s second youngest, is now 30 years old. It encompasses some 50 institutions and 80,000 enrollments. Striking is how much Costa Rican public higher education has maintained its standing, even as it has lost its enrollment share. As was the case in the 1970s, there are still only four public universities (apart from a distance university). The four continue to be led by the University of Costa Rica, in essence the national university. Despite a movement in the 1970s to build regional campuses of the public universities, the lack of public university proliferation is unusual for Latin America. It has allowed comparatively uniform quality and at a rather high level. Recent surveying shows that 85 percent of secondary school graduates prefer to attend public rather than private universities. Even the public technical university draws on private secondary schools (generally advantaged) for the majority of its entrants. Public universities have also maintained an unusual degree of autonomy—a lack of accountability, in the view of critics. There are interuniversity regulatory bodies, but the public universities basically run themselves. At the same time, the universities have undertaken more reforms than many of their regional counterparts. A major example is tuition and other measures that introduce some privateness. Also, there is government funding of student loans, the majority of which involve the private higher education sector, due to its size and the level of tuition charges. Government subsidies given directly to institutions are only for public universities. In part because the public sector has adapted and to a larger extent because it maintains enviable quality and has not pursued either huge expansion or the leftist activism characteristic of the 1970s, Costa Rica has escaped some of the public-private clashes seen in sister republics. On the other hand, formal public-private partnerships remain rare (though, as is common globally, private institutions hire, through part-time appointments, professors from the public institutions). In comparative terms, Costa Rica is noteworthy for the separateness and distinctiveness of the public and private sectors.