The Chilean Path
From Student Protest to Managed University
Abstract
Chile’s higher education trajectory illustrates how reforming market-based systems generates new
institutional tensions rather than dissolving them. The 2018 Higher Education Law replaced student
debt with state-funded access but reconfigured market competition as accreditation-driven
compliance. The resulting managerial architecture produced quality-of-life frictions absent from the
original student critique, complicating prospective counter-reforms and exposing the structural
limits of the state-versus-market frame.
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