Abstract:

The quality of for-profit higher education institutions is a controversial and widely discussed topic worldwide. Chile is not immune to those discussions; the 2011-2012 student movement demanded the elimination of for-profit higher education and the increase in the financing for traditional universities, something sustained on the idea that the nature of these institutions had a lot to do with their quality. Higher education in Chile is perhaps the system with the most aggressive expansion following the 1981 reform, which allowed massive entry of private sector providers and an unprecedented increase in coverage. While this allowed the change from an elitist to a broad- reaching system, there has been a lot of scrutiny about the quality, objectives and the role of higher education institutions.
We evaluate a number of indicators of the quality of universities, based on input variables used in international rankings. We built these indicators using different variable sets and different methods to weight and standardize variables. Then, we group universities into categories using a clustering method. The application of this method to Chilean universities shows that a classification in four quality groups systematically indicated that two State supported universities, created before the reform of 1981, are consistently at the highest quality level. One of these institutions is public, while the other is private. The classification of the remaining universities in the three other quality categories varies according to the methodology used; however neither being a State supported university, nor the distinction between private or public, are associated with quality. Finally, we show that any policy that had limited coverage or provided additional funding considering “traditions types” of universities over our quality criteria would reduce average quality.

Keywords:

Higher Education, ranking, clusters, Chile.