Abstract
In recent decades, there has been a revival of free tuition policies around the world. Understanding the current revival of these policies is particularly important as it positions higher education as a social right or public good challenging the predominant discourse that situates higher education as a private good. Chile, a country often characterized as a neoliberal laboratory, implemented a free-tuition policy in 2016 and offers a case study to understand the policy formation and the political dynamics behind it. Based on the advocacy coalition framework and using discourse network analysis and in-depth interviews, this paper focuses on identifying the main actors involved in the policy discussion, their beliefs about free college in Chile, and how they interact during the policy development. Findings show that the Chilean free tuition policy was the result of the joint actions of actors who shared similar beliefs and formed coalitions to try to influence the policy design. Findings also highlight the formation of two opposite coalitions that were able to introduce their beliefs into the policy design at political and technical levels. Implications for policymakers and researchers are discussed.
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Data availability
The data that support the discourse network analysis of this study are available from the corresponding author, PCM, upon reasonable request. Interview data are not available because participants of this study did not give consent for their data to be shared publicly.
Notes
Author calculation based on 2017 MINEDUC data.
Due to the structure of the HE system in Chile, where state HEIs coexist with private but publicly subsidized institutions, the term public is not equivalent to state HE.
The search was performed in Google advanced search in Spanish using the keywords financiamiento, educación superior, gratuidad, gratis, and movimiento estudiantil and specifying the online site of each newspaper, except for El Mercurio where the search was done by the newspaper office using the same keywords.
The specific clustering method and the number of groups were decided based on comparing the network modularity of different solutions using the option “best” in the DNA package.
Institutional accreditation is granted by the Comisión Nacional de Acreditación (CNA, National Accreditation Commission) as a way to safeguard institutional quality. The accreditation ranges between 0 (accreditation denied) to 7 years based on a determination of the institutional quality.
It is worth noting that publicly subsidized private universities were classified by the DNA as part of the opposite coalition. However, they only agreed with the policy core “private HEIs should be valued by its public function.” Interviews with the government and HEI actors clarified that those universities were always on board with the idea of free tuition and that they disagree with other aspects of the reform, specifically with the end of the direct public funding to these private institutions. Moreover, interviewees in state universities mentioned that they agreed with recognizing the public function of these publicly subsidized private universities and with including them in the free tuition policy from the beginning.
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Funding
Paula Clasing-Manquian’s contributions to this article was partially financially supported by the Becas Chile scholarship program sponsored by the Chilean government and by University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School (Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship).
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An earlier version of this paper was part of Paula Clasing-Manquian’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, where her committee was composed of Dr. Stephen DesJardins, Dr. Brian McCall, Dr. Awilda Rodriguez, and Dr. Carlos Gonzalez Ugalde.
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Clasing-Manquian, P. How free tuition became a policy in Chile: the importance of policy actors and their beliefs. High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01188-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01188-z