The Scientific Institutions Of Latin America

This book discusses the role that integrated science and higher education policies may play in further democratizing and promoting social-economic development in Latin America. It suggests that such democratizing and development may be achieved in two complementary ways: i) broadening the access to knowledge through formal learning processes of higher education, and ii) promoting the advanced qualification of people while strengthening research institutions. The book shows how this entails a complex process of policy integration, with an emphasis on human resources and institutional issues combined in processes of technical change. It discusses in detail the three main challenges that most Latin American countries face in a globalized age, based on knowledge and ever-evolving learning processes. These challenges are the need to broaden the access to higher education; to make this access more socially balanced; and to recover from a long gap in investing in knowledge production and dissemination. This book treats these issues from a variety of conceptual and methodological perspectives that present a contribution to the field of science policy and higher education studies, and inform policymakers in Latin America.

This book presents an overview of the region with one of the fastest growing higher education sectors in the world. Until the beginning of the 1980s, universities were restricted to the elites in Latin American countries, with less than 5 million students enrolled in its courses. In the last four decades, however, the region went through a boom of higher education institutions and now has more than 25 million students enrolled in more than 3,800 universities – approximately 10% of all students enrolled in higher education courses in the world with four times more higher education institutions than Europe. The boom of Latin American higher education is analyzed in this contributed volume by leading experts from the region. They discuss the causes and consequences of this massive expansion and the challenges they pose for different stakeholders such as governments, private entrepreneurs, teachers, researchers, students, policy makers, educational managers and many other social groups. Topics discussed in the volume include: Massive expansion of tertiary enrollment in Latin America Expansion of private higher education Proliferation of new kinds of institutions, different from the classic university model The challenge of developing quality assurance and accreditation systems Internationalization of academic research and teaching in Latin America The challenge of integrating academic research and technological innovation Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21st Century will be a valuable resource for educational researchers, sociologists, political scientists and other social scientists dedicated to the study of the expansion of higher education and its social implications in different parts of the world. The book will also be of interest to policy makers s and both public and private agents interested in understanding the global dynamics of higher education.

The purpose of this series is to bring together the main currents in today's higher education and examine such crucial issues as the changing nature of education in the U.S., the considerable adjustment demanded of institutions, administrators, the faculty; the role of Catholic education; the remarkable growth of higher education in Latin America, contemporary educational concerns in Europe, and more. Among the many specific questions examined in individual articles are: Is it true that women are subtly changing the academic profession? How is power concentrated in academic organizations? How successful are Latin America's private universities? What is the correlation between higher education and employment in Spain? Is minority graduate education in the U.S. producing the desired results?