This paper aims at making a contribution to elucidate issues related to higher education by means of a comparative study in the countries of Latin America’s Southern Cone by analysing their agenda of public policies for education. Based on authors in the areas of Law and Education, this investigation was conducted by a Post- Graduate Research Group in Education at the Catholic University of Santos, Brazil. Constitutional and legal texts were used, as well as articles, news reports, research in newspapers and periodicals and data from the Ministries of Education in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay. All these writings focus on public policies for education, mainly on the privatisation process prescribed for higher education by World Bank documents. In Brazil, public policies for higher education are diffuse and inefficient, subject to the dictates of international agencies like the IMF and the World Bank and are not the object of debate between society and its legitimate representatives in the legislature. They are party or government policies rather than State policies. The question of public policies for education can be understood in the very essence of what a people understands as State. And that is the first epistemological question of difficult definition which we attempt to elucidate. The countries in the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile) were “advised” by the World Bank to apply its privatising directions to higher education, but they were put into effect in different manners and with different intensity by each country. Consequently, the results obtained varied. MERCOSUL´s higher education conglomerate shows clear signs of heterogeneity as to its dimensions as well as to its qualities and resources, but the privatisation policy prescribed by the World Bank was adopted by the aforementioned countries with a higher or lower intensity. To a higher degree by Chile and Brazil and, though to a lower degree, by all other countries. On the other hand, one can take advantage of the difficult experience the Southern Cone countries are going through to extract a new parameter that will change higher education making it accessible to a significant part of the population. The 1994-2002 Brazilian government took office at a moment when the State had gone into debt, accentuated by high capital cost, so that it proposed a reform of the Brazilian State by privatising public services, especially education, and mainly higher education. Therefore the transference of public responsibilities to the private sector was conceived as the main guideline for Brazilian public policies in the 1990s and early 2000s, including public policies for education. Brazil´s situation is the most critical regarding the proportion of young people who go to college and at the same time it is the country that advanced the most in terms of privatisation, aiming at meeting the demand for higher education and increasing the number of students who reach that level by means of private institutions. However, the goal was not reached because the number of people who can pay their way through college is small and tends to decrease due to the country´s low rates of economic growth in the last decades. In face of this situation, Mr. Lula da Silva´s Administration proposed a program called PROUNI (Program of University for All) which is currently being introduced and consists of public financing of vacancies at private higher education institutions. According to the program, 10% of the vacancies would be offered by private institutions of higher education and 20% by philanthropic institutions (non-profit private institutions considered to be of public service) in exchange for tax exemption. The outcome of this agenda will depend on political goodwill and academic competence of the teaching that will be offered to the students.