THE LABOR AND EDUCATIONAL SITUATION IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Regional higher education systems up to the advent of the pandemic: privatization, commercialization, inequalities of access and the disparate development of distance education The pandemic broke out on a scenario that was highly heterogeneous among and within each of the region's countries, with an innumerable variety of responses made at the level of institutions, among which there is a very wide heterogeneity with respect to experience, accumulated knowledge, technological infrastructure and previously installed capacities. It is therefore important to analyze the socio-political and institutional conditions along with the particular characteristics of tertiary education in the region, especially with regards to the major variables that were central to the process of national responses to the pandemic situation in the field of higher education. Firstly, Latin America is distinguished as one of the regions with the highest degree of privatization of the higher education sector in the world, having 55% of its enrollment in the private sector (Red ÍndicES, 2016) places it in a very different situation to other regions such as Europe (13%) and North America (28%) (UNESCO, 2015). This burgeoning percentage also has an impact on the number of institutions, of which 67% belong to this sector, made up of a wide diversity of institution types¹⁶. These two classic indicators permit the higher education system in the region to be characterized as "hyperprivatized" (Saforcada and Rodríguez Golisano, 2019). This configuration has been taking shape over the last thirty years. During the nineties, the demand for higher education in the context of neo-liberal policies promoting the reduction of resources allocated to the level generated two concomitant processes in public universities: partial or total fee-charging, and the strengthening of selection systems leading to the development of the private sector that absorbed all this new demand, mainly through "low cost” universities, as happened in Peru, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil.
¹⁶ Institutions which are secular versus those belonging to different religions; those which are elite versus mass institutions; large, medium and very small institutions; for-profit versus non-profit institutions; national versus transnational institutions; those specializing in particular disciplines or focused on particular types of students; and face-to-face versus distance learning; etc.
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