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Accreditation in higher education has become omnipresent and, on many occasions, has been used as a synonym for quality assurance. The establishment of accreditation agencies as a worldwide phenomenon, however, is relatively recent in the history of higher education. Through a predominantly qualitative approach, this paper aims to analyze how programs from different academic disciplines perform in terms of the accreditation of graduate programs in Argentina and how different programs respond to the same accreditation process. Additionally, it analyzes the performance of private sector programs. As expected, academic disciplines play a vital role in the accreditation process, programmatic performance, and responses to this quality assurance mechanism while sector may not play a vital role. Surprisingly, soft pure programs perform better than both hard and soft applied programs. The results highlight the importance of considering both the paradigm (hard or soft) and level application (pure or applied) when analyzing the role of academic disciplines in higher education studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study how quality assurance (QA) has impacted Argentina's higher education system, how QA tasks are reflected on the organizational structure of institutions, which kind of professional profiles the new QA staff assume and to what extent university life is reconfigured from these changes. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw on data from three work fields: collection and analysis of institutional data; survey applied to a stratified sample of staff who perform QA functions; and in-depth interviews with institutional QA professionals. Results show that universities have created specific areas and developed new functions and roles in QA. Findings: The authors have observed a growing presence of dedicated personnel trained in developing these functions, positioned further down a path that had formerly distanced academics from administrative and institutional decision-makers. Unlike European universities, no evident tension was found between traditional sectors and the new professionals. Research limitations/implications: The limited number of responses of the quantitative data collection technique (survey) only allowed for a general and descriptive analysis. This limitation is compensated with two other methodological processes (documental analysis and in-depth interviews), that allowed to incorporate "type of university" as a variable analyse the data obtained. Practical implications: Results can be useful for public policy to move toward new forms of monitoring internal institutional QA systems. Originality/value: The research that supports this article aims at constructing our own categories to understand the same object that has been studied in developed countries, but in the Argentine-specific context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their common historical roots, two higher education systems in Latin America differ dramatically in their financing mechanisms. In Argentina, the national government completely subsidizes undergraduate programs in public institutions, while Chile relies mostly on tuition fees charged to individuals attending public institutions. Through quantitative and qualitative secondary sources, this paper shows that class interests (structural approach) and economic policies (ideational approach) played a major role in explaining comparative policy outcomes in these nondemocratic regimes. The article makes an explicit contribution to the understanding of comparative policy choices in nondemocratic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses how Argentine public universities responded to the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic in three dimensions: teaching and learning, scientific research and community engagement, and internationalization activities. For each of the dimensions, the actions developed, and the challenges encountered are presented. I argue that the response was quick and consistent: it is related to an academic culture that is framed in the right to university, both individual right (access, permanence, and graduation to all citizens) and collective right (benefit socio-community development). The article concludes with a preliminary analysis of the agenda items to advance regulations and policies. On several occasions a self-reflective exercise is carried out, as part of a community that is going through this situation of extraordinary urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between “marginal” and “mainstream” science has, in recent decades, become a matter of discussion. Traditional perspectives must be reexamined in the wake of transformations in the international circulation of knowledge and the subsequent diversification of scientific “peripherality”. Argentina represents an interesting case with which to explore the structure of “peripheral centres” and new forms of scientific development. While it has recently experienced an expansion in terms of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization, that process has been coupled with entrenchment of existing institutional asymmetries and persistent intra-national inequalities; academic prestige is distributed according to opposite principles of legitimation (local/international). Our main task is to explore the current state of research capacities pursuant to that expansion in order to analyze the diverse styles in which knowledge is produced. In our analysis, we make critical use of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the Latin American category of “structural heterogeneity,” while also focusing on the question of circulation. The paper outlines how professionalization has developed locally over time, and the historical tension between the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and the public universities. It describes the current structure of the scientific field in terms of researchers, institutes, publishing circuits, and institutional evaluative cultures. It focuses on geographical asymmetries in order to assess the distribution of new human and material resources throughout the country. Finally, it addresses the current situation under the new government, and raises concern over recent regressive actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term “geospatial technologies” encompasses a large area of fields involving cartography, spatial analysis, geographic information system, remote sensing, global positioning systems and many others. These technologies should be expected to be available (as “natural tools”) for a country with a large surface and a variety of climates, such as Argentina. The present paper offers a brief description of the geographical features of Argentina, its facilities and resources related to geospatial technologies, and consequently examines the extent to which these techniques are being taught at higher education in this country. Hence, the aim of this paper is to stimulate the teaching of geospatial technologies in the universities, in order to improve the welfare of the Argentinan society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]