This research project aims to evaluate whether Latin American higher education systems exacerbate or alleviate socioeconomic inequalities and examine the mechanisms perpetuating disparities or facilitating upward mobility.
Latin America, long characterised by exceptionally high levels of inequality, is a region where the promise of upward mobility has been bolstered by sustained economic growth and an unprecedented expansion of higher education in recent decades. Yet tertiary systems continue to turn advantages of birth into legitimate achievements, show persistent gender segregation, and leave many young people with considerable debt levels. These trends raise crucial questions concerning not only the basis for the legitimacy of a country’s educational system – its effective commitment to ‘equal opportunity’ and upward mobility – but also whether the ‘rate of return’ to education is high enough to justify its growing cost.
Our research addresses these questions by comparatively looking at the case of Chile and Mexico. Chile has experienced remarkable economic growth and a swift massification of higher education in recent decades. Yet successive waves of social unrest have foregrounded a strong critique of an unequal and highly privatised educational system, which has increased access but generated a mass of debtors and tends to produce lingering inequalities in the access to the labour market along class and gender lines. While Mexico’s educational system mirrors Chile in reproducing inequalities and legitimising advantages of birth, it differs in having a significant public university sector with uneven funding, alongside expensive private universities and low-quality ‘demand absorption’ universities for people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Against this backdrop, our primary aim is to empirically examine whether Chile’s and Mexico's higher education systems intensify or lessen socioeconomic inequalities. We address this main aim through three specific objectives:
- Investigate how inequalities based on class background and gender impact access to various universities and academic programs within Chile's and Mexico’s higher education systems.
- Examine if upward mobility is more prevalent in some universities and academic programmes than others in Chile and Mexico and whether this varies by class background, gender, and indebtedness.
- Explore the challenges and barriers the upward mobile face while navigating higher education and during their transition to the labour market.