Higher Education in the European Union and in Mercosur/unasur

BOTTO, MERCEDES

Budapest

Conferencia; Hungarian- latin america Forum; 2015

My objective is tocompare policies of higher education in two different regional blocks .Highereducation has been traditional an important issue for people and for nationalstates. For the first, access to higher educations has been a mechanism toimprove personal skills and better social opportunities, at list in the labormarket. For the second, HE policies have been used as a tool to promote socialcohesion and economic development.       Whatis new in the nighties is the place of HE in regional integration processes.But this is not a global pattern. Even though in a context of increasingeconomic globalization, national governments have created regions to attractfinancial and productive investments, only a few have included education aspart of their regional agenda.             Theseare the cases of UE and Mercosur, in which governments have included HE eitheras a strategy to improve competitiveness in the global market and /or amechanism for social cohesion. My proposal in these presentation is to describethe contents and outcomes of these policies in order to answer to the questionto what extent both regions follow the same governance pattern?. The answer iwill try to demonstrate is that UE has been successful to perform both regionalobjectives (to improve competition and social cohesion; while in Mercosur HEhas been a policy that contributed to reinforce cooperation among countries andinstitutions, helping to reinforce mutual recognition and trust amongcountries; but they have not been able to achieve a common education market yetand national states continues to be the main actors. For doing that, iwill first characterized each regional policy in terms of drivers , outcomesand impacts for countries, and them in the third part, to pick the mainsimilarities and changes in this three dimensions.