Argentina

MARQUINA ,MÓNICA; CHIROLEU, ADRIANA

Getting into varsity ? Comparability, convergence and congruence

Cambria Press Inc.

Año: 2010; p. 75 - 82

The binary nature of the higher education system in Argentina is composed of a university sector and other tertiary institutions, mainly aimed at training teachers and technicians. Its development was relatively sustained during the 20th century, with an expansion given almost exclusively by the growth of public universities, which denotes the strong mark left by the university reform of 1918, in which autonomy was the hallmark of these institutions. The non-university sector of higher education takes specific characteristics and distinct from the university. Devoted to teacher training and higher level technicians, these institutions host under one third of the total enrollment in higher education, and are presented in the social imaginary as devaluated options against the public university, which offers possibilities of free tuition and lax admission requirements. Access to these public universities are correlated, however, with high dropout rates, especially in the early years, which has led recently to the institutions to go beyond of traditional solutions based on the antinomy "restrictive policies - policies of open admission". This chapter aims to characterize the national and institutional policies of admission to higher education in Argentina. To do this, after a brief review of the theoretical debates on access to higher education, we briefly describe the evolution of these policies since the mid-twentieth century to the present, and then go into the deep reforms that were introduced during the 90 years, which generated some institutional admission policies that call into question both the restrictive policies such as the supposed democratization implicit in the policies of open admission.