Cambio institucional y complejidad emergente de la educación superior en América Latina

Abstract

The central argument of the article is that the last two decades mark a period of transition between two paradigms of politics in higher education in Latin America: the developmental and the modernizing. The main forces or motors in this transition have been the changes in the social, political and productive environment, political changes, and accumulated, as well as new, tensions in the systems and institutions of higher education. From a comparative perspective, efforts are made to identify the tendencies in each one of these factors of change, analyzing some of the effects on different "spheres" of performance of higher education institutions (with emphasis on the case of the universities).