Private higher education and inequalities in the Global South lessons from Africa, Latin America and Asia

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

El abordaje del tema de internacionalización universitaria, requiere de una visión integral que permita la convergencia de las funciones sustantivas de las instituciones de educación superior, como lo son la investigación, docencia y extensión. Esta premisa teórica que se plantea son los referentes de análisis, basado en el conocimiento y experiencia de los procesos nacionales, regionales e internacionales. Las reflexiones, dejan en evidencia la necesidad de un plan de integración que articule la heterogeneidad de los países e instituciones de educación superior, para construir y potenciar una relación de cooperación sur-sur más estrecha y efectiva que permita avanzar en los procesos de internacionalización regional, que permitirían una mayor identidad e independencia.

Introduction: In Latin America, university dropouts significantly influence the individual development of students and the socioeconomic progress of the region. Identifying risk factors allows educational institutions to recognize and address the specific needs of their students to create effective methods that foster academic success and retention. Objective: Analyze the various risk factors for student Dropout in Higher Education Institutions in Latin America with the purpose of proposing strategies that reduce the negative rates of this problem. Methods: A bibliographic review of studies published between 2010 and 2024 on risk factors for student dropout in higher education in Latin America was carried out, using relevant databases and applying rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: Personal, academic, institutional and socioeconomic variables are part of the risk factors for University Dropout. The lack of access to Higher Education has a significant impact on the economic and social growth of Latin America since it is essential for the training of qualified professionals. The high dropout rate contributes to a less prepared workforce and limits job opportunities for young people. Conclusions: The prevalent risk factors were academic and personal associated with university dropout in Latin America, which is why various strategies were proposed to generate inclusive and equitable higher education through the reformulation of public and institutional policies.

Virtual classrooms in Latin America facilitate Higher Education learning processes in Latin America. This qualitative research is based on the writing of some bibliographical analysis and conceptualization methods found in several scientific articles which cover both from the importance and understanding of the impact that virtual classrooms have on the academic context. A guided bibliographical technique applied through four questions such as: What kind of impact do virtual classrooms have on Higher Education didactic processes in Latin America? To what extent, do virtual classrooms have an impact on administrative and operative processes in regards of Higher Education learning processes in Latin America? Are virtual classrooms quality indicator tools used in Higher Education evaluations and accreditation in Latin America? On the whole, TICs contribute to administrative, financial and educational procedures therefore, minimizing time and resources while offering students learning environments within virtual class-rooms containing cutting-age technology that will certainly meet their technological needs.

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to analyse the policy trajectory of the inter-regional plans to establish a common space in higher education (HE) involving the European Union (EU) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) regions. Although both regions developed different formats of higher education cooperation programmes, it was in 1999 that an institutionalised bi-regional dialogue appeared – and HE was defined as a strategic partnership. In November 2000, ministers of education on both sides of the Atlantic launched the largest HE project to date: the EU-LAC (ALCUE) HE Common Area, involving 60 HE systems. Understanding (inter-)regional HE policies as an expression of global education policies, I conducted a historical analysis of this inter-regional policy from 2000 until 2018 using Roger Dale's framework of pluri-scalar governance of education. The tracing of the events since 1999 helped unveil the mechanisms of changes in this inter-regional policy. As a result, I was able to differentiate between two moments in the policy process: the ALCUE Project (2000–2008) and the EU-CELAC dialogue (2010–2018). Results point to the defining role of the EU in shaping the inter-regional dialogue in terms of regional mandate and actorness. The research shows that the advent of CELAC as a regional actor in Latin America in 2010 has strengthened the role of the EU in defining the inter-regional HE project.

Editorial Commentary

Introduction higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean educational reform in Latin America and the Caribbean - Argentina, Nicaragua and Venezuela the search for knowledge and the university as a bureaucracy - the role of the university in Latin America and the Caribbean technological transfer from the higher education sector in non-industrial societies academic institutions in the non-intellectual society - the role of intellecutals in Venezuela educational reform and educational policies - the ideological legitimation for social stability higher education in Latin America at the end of the century.

Since 2008, there has been a notable increase in studies on processes of inclusion, retention and graduation of indigenous students in higher education in Latin America; a growing interest in research and university extension activities in collaboration with indigenous and Afro-descendant communities; and the establishment of intercultural academic spaces in the region. This article offers a literature review analysis of this field of study and intervention, elaborated in Spanish and Portuguese in the framework of Latin American institutions. This analysis identifies the various voices, analytical perspectives, lines of research, conceptual debates and contributions that enrich the understanding of some types of experiences in this field, often described as 'intercultural', and others usually considered as educational inclusion of indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in the field of Higher Education in Latin America. The literature review reveals that much of this research is the result of collaborative work between diverse actors committed to promoting intercultural perspectives at the higher education level, and reflects the historical struggles sustained by these peoples as the fundamental structuring component of these experiences. It is concluded that the increase in research and interventions makes it plausible to postulate and describe the consolidation of a specific field of study and intervention for Latin America, which can be defined as 'Higher Education, Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples' and that the experiences analysed reflect a particular and historical link between university systems and Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America.

Access to higher education has increased substantially in Latin America, but inequalities in access to and completion of higher education still remain. In this regard, identifying vulnerable groups and exclusion factors is a priority in Latin America’s university systems. The aim of this article is to understand in depth governing board perceptions of exclusion factors in higher education institutions in Latin America. The study has identified five key factors that help better understand exclusion from higher education in Latin America: (a) personal characteristics, (b) family situation, (c) institutional features, (d) public policies, and (e) phases of university students’ development.

"Myth, Reality, and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America" analyzes Latin American higher education in terms of four major functions: academic leadership, professional development, technological training and development, and general higher education. Overall, the authors make the case that Latin America's modernization and integration into the global economy and society depends on higher education. They propose to consolidate the strengths of higher education systems while fundamentally reforming their weaker features, and they make policy proposals on finance, governance and quality control.

In the Latin American context, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) cites indigenous groups, physically disabled people, populations with a low human development index (HDI), and women as potential groups at risk of, or suffering, social exclusion. Access to higher education has increased substantially in Latin America, but inequalities in access to, and completion of, higher education remain. In this regard, identifying vulnerable groups and exclusion factors is a priority in Latin America’s university systems. The aim of this chapter is to understand in depth governing boards’ perceptions of exclusion factors in higher education institutions in Latin America. Nineteen institutional representatives of Latin American universities were interviewed, selected from amongst the 24 institutions involved in the ACCEDES project. In addition, the 19 university governing board members interviewed were grouped into 3 focus groups, comprising between 4 and 7 participants each. Considering that exclusion factors are affected by contextual and geographical characteristics, participants were grouped according to the three geographical regions of Latin America (including North America and South America). The first focus group was held in Cuba and included representatives of North America and the Caribbean islands (i.e., Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba). The second focus group was held in Venezuela and included representatives of the South American Andean region (i.e., Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela). The last focus group was held in Paraguay and included the South American southern countries (i.e., Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay). In conclusion, we have identified five key factors that help better understand exclusion from higher education in Latin America: (1) personal characteristics, (2) family situation, (3) institutional features, (4) public policies, and (5) the developmental phase of university students.

This article aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature on the impact of sustainability in higher pedagogical education from the perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Latin America, covering the period from 2019 to 2024. Using the Prisma methodology, exhaustive search was carried out in databases such as Scopus and Science Direct, employing keywords such as "sustainability," "SDGs," and "higher pedagogical education." The initial search identified 450 records, of which 250 articles met the inclusion criteria. After a detailed analysis, 34 articles were excluded, leaving 17 relevant articles for the review. These studies provide a solid foundation for analyzing how sustainability influences higher pedagogical education in Latin America, emphasizing the importance of integrating the SDGs into educational programs to promote sustainable development. The results confirm that implementing sustainable strategies in higher education is essential for achieving the SDGs, fostering academic training that responds to global sustainability challenges. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the role of higher education in sustainable development in the region. DOI : https://doi.org/10.52783/pst.2420

GoalTo improve the understanding of higher education in hospitality and tourism in Latin America and Spain, the critical success factors and the determinants of the price of the educational programs.Objectives* To identify the current market supply on offer of graduate and postgraduate programs of hospitality and tourism studies in Latin America and Spain.* To ascertain the critical success factors perception gaps between academic managers, program directors, tourism students and students from other subjects.* To evaluate the price impact of the determinants of the prices of the hospitality and tourism academic programs.MethodologyIn order to reach the first objective, in 2014 we collected data from the Webs of the academic institutions, as well as from the e-mail and telephone contacts with the persons of these institutions. The information was grouped in seven groups for further analysis: (1) Geographical area; (2) Typology; (3) Academic factors; (4) Convenience factors; (5) Financial factors; (6) Employment promotion factors and (7) Promotion and recruitment factors.From the universe of academic institutions we identified 906 both public and private institutions offering graduate and postgraduate education on hospitality and tourism in Latin America and Spain. These institutions are located in 21 countries, covering 2,380 programs, from which 1,717 are graduate and 863 are postgraduate.In relation to the second objective, we sent an on-line questionnaire to all managers of the programs and a sample of students. The sample sizes were 348 and 202 responses respectively. The number of academic institutions delivering responses was 231. These data was analysed utilizing a confirmatory analysis to determine the critical success factors.In relation to the third objective of this research, the analysis is based on the price data obtained from 617 postgraduate programs, which represents a 71.5% of the total postgraduate programs investigated. The methodology is based on the hedonic price model, which is based on the hypothesis that the price of an education program can be successfully explained by a set of explanatory characteristics of the programs. The prices for different countries were converted by the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) index to enable comparability. We identified a total of 24 potential explanatory variables which were grouped into different categories according to the empirical evidence and similar models to be found in the literature.ResultsThe dissertation consists of three research works. The first one analyses the differences among the type of programs (graduate or postgraduate), country and region (Latin America or Spain) across the seven typical aforementioned groups of factors that commonly characterize an academic hospitality and tourism program. Latin America shares the largest number of programs (71.6%) with 1,705 individual degrees on offer, while Spain shares 28.4% with 675 programs. However, the distribution is uneven across graduate and postgraduate types. In 2015, Latin America offered 1,370 graduate programs and 335 postgraduate programs, while in Spain it was offered 147 graduate programs and 528 postgraduate programs. Spain, Brazil and Mexico share the largest shares of the total supply of academic programs in hospitality and tourism, with 28.4%, 22.4% and 19.5% respectively. Altogether they represent a 70.3% of the total supply. These shares are followed by Argentina (7.5%), Peru (2.8%) and Colombia (2.6%).In relation to the academic factors, a 71% of the institutions offering academic programs are private institutions. In respect of the convenience factors, it is found that the online mode represents an 11.9% in Latin America and 36.2% in Spain. The academic areas with more programs are Tourism Management, Hospitality Food and Beverage in both regions. There is also a growing interest in the area of MICE, Tourism Marketing and Sustainability. …

This collection of 15 essays originated in a 1999 conference held at the University of Costa Rica to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in that country. Four chapters on the struggles of female academics to establish themselves, as well as the discipline of gender studies, in Costa Rica’s universities form the second part of the book. The longer first part consists of six essays on feminist struggles in Costa Rica during the twentieth century and five on other topics. These include Asunción Lavrin’s survey of suffragist arguments across Latin America, historical case studies of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Panama, and an essay on Chicana history. The theme of women’s suffrage ties together most, but not all, of the essays—most of which rely on extensive primary documentation.The section on gender and higher education in Costa Rica celebrates the gains made by female students and academics since the 1970s, but it also warns of ongoing sexism in academia at all levels. The greatest accomplishment of feminist academics in Costa Rica has been the creation, in 1993, of a master’s program in women’s studies, run jointly by the University of Costa Rica and the National University. Women have also made gains in nontraditional majors, in administration, and in research. Feminist historiography itself has progressed rapidly in Costa Rica in the past decade, not least with a previous volume also edited by Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, Entre silencios y voces: Género e historia en América Central, 1750–1990 (Centro Nacional Para el Desarrollo de la Mujer y la Familia, 1998).This collection’s essays on Costa Rican history contribute somewhat unevenly to that historiography: they tend to assume prior understanding of the forces and phases of the nation’s political history from the 1910s, and they could more directly speak to each other. Rodríguez Sáenz’s piece surveys the struggle for the vote, particularly from the founding of the Liga Feminista in 1923, while Virginia Mora Carvajal examines the enthusiastic participation of women in the prosuffrage Partido Reformista’s 1923 campaign. Rosalila Herrera Zavaleta profiles the small but vocal group of Communist Party–affiliated female teachers in the 1930s who explicitly questioned the value of suffrage. The best known of these revolutionary women was Carmen Lyra, who published (along with Magda Portal and Gabriela Mistral) in El Repertorio Americano, a modernist magazine that is the focus of Ruth Cubillo Paniagua’s essay. Also part of the feminist milieu of 1930s Costa Rica was Yolanda Oreamuno, the subject of Emilia Macaya Trejos’s essay of literary criticism. Together, these essays confirm that feminism thrived in Latin America’s smaller republics and that it was broadly similar to that of, say, Argentina and Mexico in terms of the influence of liberalism, modernism, leftist and labor movements, and access to higher education. Feminism and women’s activism outside San José is a topic that is broached but not explored in depth.Both Yolanda Marco’s notable essay on the 1936 women’s suffrage debate in Panama’s Congress and Rodríguez Sáenz’s discussion of similar debates in Costa Rica illustrate Lavrin’s argument that the prosuffrage position in Latin America was framed more in terms of individual rights than in terms of building democratic systems. Marco also argues persuasively that it was the highly competitive nature of Panamanian politics in the late 1930s, and not traditional views, that defeated suffrage proposals. Certainly, the Panamanian feminist movement was remarkably strong. K. Lynn Stoner’s piece on the causes and effects of early women’s suffrage in Cuba also suggests the importance of traditional political calculus over principle in understanding women’s suffrage in Latin America. Marco (echoing Mora Carvajal’s study of disenfranchised women party activists in Costa Rica) points out that expressions of female citizen identity long preceded its formal recognition by the state. Finally, Marco stands out for her reference to race: Panamanian feminists argued that if the San Blas Indians had the vote, they deserved it even more so.Neither Sara Poggio’s essay on Chicana history nor Victoria González’s on Nicaragua engage the question of suffrage, but in different ways both highlight the impact of expanding U.S. presence on Latin American women and on constructions of gender and nation in Latin America. Finally, Sylvia Chant contributes a fine ethnographic study of working-class masculine identity in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica.This volume will appeal most to specialists on Costa Rica and on Central American women’s history. It is also a useful reminder to all that women’s history and the discipline of women’s studies are not limited to the larger nations of Latin America that tend to dominate the literature.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in various regions of the world through the years. Since 2008, this phenomenon has received plenty of attention from higher education and universities across countries began to produce these courses. The countries of Europe and the United States are the world’s leading producers of MOOCs and research studies reporting on this topic. This previous research has focused on (1) analysing data from global providers such as edX, Coursera or FutureLearn; (2) describing learners’ characteristics from a small sample of courses in these regions; and (3) offering overviews of courses and platforms. However, research in other regions such as Latin America or Africa are very scarce. As a consequence, little is known about local initiatives in Latin America region, and about the needs and characteristics of its learners. Moreover, this has generated an unequal and biased perspective of what we know today about MOOC learners. To close this inequality gap, this work, presents a cross-platform exploratory study in Latin America, using data from more than three million learners and seven different MOOC providers to generate a joint comparable analysis about students’ characteristics in this region with others regions in the world. Preliminary results report on the differences and similarities of trends based on level of education, age, gender of students, their level of activity and performance of learners in Latin America through the different providers of MOOCs. These results help us understand the MOOC ecosystem in Latin America and report results to the entire community, while at the same time calling for more large-scale studies between researchers and institutions.