Thursday at lunchtime, and the area around the University of Chile’s engineering faculty is a veritable battlefield. Strewn garbage burns on the streets, and the sting of tear gas fills the air. Armored police vehicles come flying around corners toward taunting students, who pelt them with rocks.
The riot police charge, and bystanders hide in their doorways. In the background is the incongruous yet constant beat of a percussion section on the building’s roof.
The confrontation, during the last week of September, was one of the worst yet in a four-month conflict between students and the government, but it is not unusual.
Ever since May, when students, angered by what they saw as government inaction, walked out of classes to protest the high tuition costs that lead to heavy personal debt, marches have brought this capital city to a halt, sometimes ending in violence.
The question of why such protests have erupted in Chile, the country that is by many measures the most advanced in South America and the one that spends most on education, might seem perplexing to outside observers. The answer, say experts, is in the question: The unrest is precisely because of the country’s leap forward.
“The current crisis has much to do with the success of social and educational policies over the last 20 years,” says Andres Gomez-Lobo, an associate professor of economics at the university who helped write a recent report on the costs of education reform.
“This is happening because you are getting middle- and lower-income students into higher education,” he says. “You have massive numbers of students, and you need to help fund that. Debt is a huge issue. And dropout rates are high because of the cost.”
Chile is also being watched by other nations in Latin America, none of which levy significant tuition fees on college students. The region has suffered relatively little from the global economic crisis and continues to grow, fueling demand for higher education, especially from the lower and middle classes. Whether the countries can afford that under their current models of free public education, or will follow Chile’s lead and charge tuition, will be a key question in the years to come.
“Some countries would like to move in the direction of charging fees,” says Patricio Meller, director of projects at Cieplan, an internationally supported think tank in Santiago. “What is happening in Chile shows that it is not a good idea to start charging. It is going to provide a negative incentive for them to do that.”
A Problem of Numbers
The number of Chilean students pursuing higher education rose from 250,000 in 1990 to almost one million last year, with more than 300,000 new students enrolling just in the past five years, according to the Ministry of Education.
The increase is fueled in part by economic growth. Chile and Uruguay lead Latin America in almost all social indicators. Chile’s economy, based largely on its vast copper reserves, has grown at a stable pace in recent decades. More highly trained workers are needed, especially technical workers and skilled tradesmen, Students with university degrees can earn four times as much as those with only high-school credentials. And a greater proportion of children in Chile now finish secondary school than in Norway, Australia, or Iceland, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
To absorb that demand, new universities have opened, and infrastructure has been added to existing institutions. Yet tuition fees have risen so much—top universities now charge $8,000 a year, which exceeds the rates of all other OECD nations as a percentage of gross domestic product per capita—that even students who get decent jobs have trouble paying off their debts. Minimum wage in Chile amounts to less than $4,300 a year.
“Families are taking on long-term debts to be able to pay for this supposed dream, this expectation of higher education changing lives, without the dream coming true,” says Giorgio Jackson, an information-technology student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who is a leader of the student protests.
Adolfo Henriquez, who graduated from the University of Chile three years ago with a degree in psychology, says he is still more than $15,000 in debt from his education. “If I’d known it was going to be like this,” he says, “I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it.”
Although Chile spends 6.4 percent of its gross domestic product on education, less than 1 percent of it goes to the university level. And OECD statistics show that 79.3 percent of Chile’s expenditures on higher education comes from families—principally those lower-income families new to higher education—a burden it called “large and excessive.”
Augusto Bastidas helps pay for his son to study automotive engineering at the university level. The son, Enrique, 19, is the first person in his family to go to university, but the course is expensive. All told, monthly tuition and living expenses come to more than 200,000 pesos, or about $390, most of which is paid for by his father, a taxi driver, and grandfather, a baker. Around one-fifth of the father’s pay goes to putting his son through university.
“It makes me mad,” says Mr. Bastidas, 46. “There are people who have more than me and get help, but I don’t have anything, and I can’t get assistance.”
“My problem is that I have two other kids,” he adds. “When this one graduates, the next one is up. If I want to buy a house or a car, I’d need to get more loans, and I can’t, because I am already in debt. Your hands are tied.”
Chile’s educated elite historically go to the 25 so-called traditional universities, which include the country’s top-ranked institutions, most of which are public and receive government subsidies. Although tuition there is not noticeably cheaper than at the private universities, academic quality is generally better, and the little research that takes place in Chile is done there. Students with the highest scores on the university entrance exam usually opt for the traditional universities, leaving others to enroll in the private universities.
Failed ‘Revolution’
The seeds of protest were sown in December, when the education minister said the government would begin a “revolution” in higher education. Previous governments had avoided higher-education reform, preferring to concentrate on elementary and secondary education, and the announcement was a welcome surprise to many.
But when the government finally revealed only timid reforms, in May, there was widespread disappointment, says José Joaquin Brunner, who is one of Chile’s most respected professors and education researchers.
The first demonstration was organized shortly after by the Confederation of Chilean Students, which represents students at the traditional universities. The most prominent of its three media-savvy and determined student leaders is Camila Vallejo, whose face, with her pierced nose, has become the symbol of the protesters. Classes at most of the universities have been out since May, although each faculty votes each week on whether or not to continue the strike.
In the months since, students have marched in the capital almost every week, sometimes rallying more than 100,000 people. They have been joined by other protesters, some of whose opposition is to the country’s first right-wing government in a generation, and by others, most notably high-school students, who are also demanding educational reform.
Walls in Santiago, a modern city with the snow-capped Andes on the horizon, are covered with graffiti proclaiming such things as “Class War” and “If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep,” a reference to the frequent protests by citizens who bang pots and pans.
Many shops, banks, and stores are boarded up for security, but the students retain widespread support from ordinary Chileans, with the polls consistently showing more than 70 percent backing their cause.
“They cause me problems because of the traffic, and if I hear on the radio they are protesting, I either go to another part of the city or I go home,” says Mr. Bastidas, the taxi driver. “But I support them. They are doing the right thing. Education here is too expensive.”
Deeper Reforms Demanded
As the government procrastinated and students gathered support from multiple sectors of society, their demands have increased. “Everybody knows students are in debt. The government hasn’t been able to say, ‘Let’s talk about this and this and this,’ and so now everybody’s issues are on the table,” says Gregory Elacqua, director of the Public Policy Institute at Diego Portales University. “The main issue used to be costs, and it still is. But now we’re talking about profits, primary and secondary education, and other issues that were not on the table a few months ago.”
One problem recognized by both sides is the discrepancy in payment plans offered to students in public and private universities. Students have a two-year grace period after finishing their degrees before they must start paying off their loans. But those at public universities pay interest rates of 2 percent on the loans, while students in private institutions pay rates closer to 6 percent. Many experts believe the debate must center not on whether education should be free, as many students are now demanding, but on how to make it more affordable for lower-income students.
“Very few people talk about inequality, and that is the root of the problem,” says Jorge Sequeira, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Chile. “If there are resources, they should go to the students in the lower and middle classes who have the intellectual means to go to university. We’ve nothing against free education, but there are priorities, and those are the lower and middle classes.”
While most of the striking students are justifiably focused on the cost of education, some administrators would like to see more debate about quality in education. “What does quality mean? How do we measure it?” asks Gonzalo Vargas, rector of the Technological University of Chile. “How as a country do we want to get more quality education? I’d like us to discuss what is going on in the rest of the world, like Bologna and the internationalization of the curriculum.”
Students at the private universities have remained largely outside the fray. Those institutions continue to function largely as before. Experts cite several explanations for this, not least of which is that poorer students are more likely to hold down jobs, have farther to travel, and be less engaged in politics and less organized.
If nothing else, the conflict has made reform now seem unavoidable. But a resolution could still be months away, and there is widespread concern that students will lose this academic year entirely. That would put hundreds of thousands of degrees into question and perhaps even threaten the survival of some universities, particularly the less wealthy ones, in the provinces. Neither the students nor the government is likely to end up satisfied, but most people believe the overall outcome will be positive.
“I think these protests can only bring benefits by producing reforms in the higher-education system that citizens have been waiting for,” Victor Pérez, rector of the country’s top-ranked institution, the University of Chile, told a Santiago newspaper. “For years we have been denouncing the situation as unsustainable, so I am therefore optimistic that concrete benefits will come for higher education, and for publicly funded higher education in particular.”
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