Publication Date
11-5-2025
Description
This article critically and comparatively analyzes the restructuring of university financing in Chile and Colombia in response to neoliberal policies. It emphasizes the consolidation of student debt as a structural device of inclusion. A combined approach—a review of budget series (2000– 2024), sectoral regulations, official statistical bases, and specialized literature—reveals two central findings. First, both countries have experienced chronic public disinvestment, which has been compensated for by the rapid expansion of end-user subsidies and student loans (CAE in Chile and ICETEX in Colombia), thereby shifting costs and risks from the state to households. Second, the resulting increase in debt delinquency and high debt-to-income ratios creates trajectories for young people that are marked by precarity, eroding the redistributive promise of higher education and fracturing youth citizenship. The study concludes that student debt operates less as a financing instrument and more as a technology of neoliberal governmentality that produces indebted subjects who are personally liable for risk while simultaneously legitimizing State withdrawal. A progressive fiscal pact is necessary to reverse these trends. Such a pact would restore direct public investment, divorce university access from individual indebtedness, and reinstate the university as a public and democratic institution.
Type
Working Paper(unpublished)
Language
en