Access to Higher Education in Chile: A Literature Review

Massive student protests started in 2006 as a result of several issues that the previous administrations had not tackled Students marched to protest against high tuition and enrollments costs, low education quality and limited employment opportunities. High school students protests in 2006 and university student protests in 2011 impacted policy debates that leaned toward free education in order to reduce social segmentation (World Politics Review, 2017). In this scenario, it becomes important to identify the most important issues around educational policy in Chile and evaluate how the system has evolved in the last decades. In this paper I survey the literature to better understand how has access to higher education evolved in Chile and how the different policy decisions around it have shaped tertiary education to what it is now.