The (de) construction of the public university: the power of mass media in Chile

Author(s):

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela (presenting / submitting) Elisabeth Simbürger (presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 12 D,

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-25

09:00-10:30

Room:

K5.19

Chair:

Mariana Gaio Alves

Contribution

Chile exhibits one of the most privatised higher education system (HES) in the world, a tendency closely followed by countries such as the United Kingdom and South-Korea, Japan and the United States (OECD, 2014). Firstly, of a total of 60 universities, only 16 are public universities and most of students (80%) are enrolled in private universities. The latter is a consequence of a package of laws that was imposed in the 1980’s during the Pinochet dictatorship and that have remained in force until today. These laws intended to open the market of higher education to promote a widening participation but, most importantly, to allow the private sector to play a key role. As a consequence, numerous new private universities – most of them teaching-oriented universities – were created since 1981 onwards. Secondly, although in Chile historically traditional private universities have received direct funding from the state since their creation, currently, public funding for both public and traditional private universities have decreased from a 90% before 1981 to an average of 15% in the case of public universities (Contraloría General de la República, 2012). As a consequence of a scarce of public funds, public and private universities compete for financial resources mainly by attracting new students and competing for research funds. And thirdly, because Chile’s tuition fees are one of the highest in the world (adjusted by Purchasing Power Parity), students and their families have taken on the financial burden. Around 60% of students receive financial support in the form of scholarships or loans subsidised by the state (SIES, 2014) but managed by private banks. Meanwhile, students had to pay their loans with an interest rate of 6%, which decreased to 2% after a student movement in 2011 An important fact here is that most students (66.7%) who benefit from subsidised loans are enrolled in private universities, and 12.7% of them study at private universities that have been investigated because of their profit- orientation (Kremerman and Páez, 2016).

The increasing marketisation and privatisation of public goods have not only experienced in Chile but have turned into a global phenomenon (Naidoo, Shankar, and Ekant, 2014) in which the boundaries between public and private have become fuzzy. In analysing the conceptualisation of the ‘public’ in the context of hybrid university discourses, Guzmán-Valenzuela (2016) refers to an exchangeability of the concepts of public and private where public universities display some features of private universities and some private universities present themselves as fulfilling public roles. Other studies (Fairclough, 1993; Lowrie and Willmott, 2006; 2005b; Simbürger, 2012; Guzmán-Valenzuela & Barnett 2013) have researched how marketisation processes in higher education have been transforming the public discourse about the university.

In this paper, we pay attention to the role that mass-media and particularly newspapers in Chile have played in the construction of a discourse around the public university. Mass-media have been identified as a powerful means to spread discourses in society (Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston, 2008; Happer and Philo, 2013; van Dijk, 1995). Porta and Cianci (2016), for example, have shown how conservative mass media reinforce processes of privatisation in education and disqualify public education in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico. In Chile, Cabalín (2013) identified how conservative newspaper editorials frame educational policies, thereby taking the role of political actors in educational policy.

Method

Mass-media have been seen as a means to create and spread certain discourses in the society and to promote certain values or ideologies (van Dijk, 1995; Bennett, Lawrence & Livingston, 2008; Happer & Philo, 2013) which are not always evident or explicit. By means of a critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1993) we aim to understand the often hidden relationships between discourses, texts and wider social and cultural structures. Particularly, we pay attention to those discourses on the public in its relationship with universities that appeared in two well-known Chilean newspapers. We analysed articles and opinion columns in two ideologically opposed newspapers in Chile, the conservative El Mercurio and the liberal El Mostrador. Particularly, we examined a total of 196 items related to higher education published in El Mercurio and El Mostrador between 1 January 2013 and 27 June 2014. In the case of El Mercurio, 37 items were opinion columns and 15 were articles (52 in total) and, for El Mostrador, 36 were opinion columns and 108 were articles (144 in total). Articles on higher education in both El Mercurio and El Mostrador were categorised using the Atlas-TI by identifying the main covered topics. For as the opinion columns, we identified the most frequent authors and their characteristics and subsequently focused on analysing the opinion columns of three columnists who wrote the majority of columns.

Expected Outcomes

The majority of articles in El Mercurio are dedicated to rather technical topics such as drop-out rates, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and internationalisation. El Mostrador, instead, mostly reports on the students’ movement and a series of scandals related to profit-like behaviours, the bribery to some members of the accreditation agency on the part of some private universities to obtain the accreditation and the insolvency of a large new private university. However, the most interesting analysis emerged from the analysis of opinion columns, particularly in El Mercurio where most of them were written by three academics. We identified three recurrent discourses: - The labelling of highly privatised systems as ‘mixed and diverse’ systems implying a positive connotation since (a plural system that allows rational choice on the part of students). - Presenting private universities as public institutions. Both private and state universities generate public goods that not only benefit individuals but also the broader society (in both economic and social terms). Therefore, all universities are public institutions in nature (Brunner, 2014). Consequently, and according to this view, allocating pubic money in private universities is the right decision. - The discard of the students’ movement demand for free public education. According to the authors, this demand is naïve and utopic since global trends show a massification of the system that the state cannot fund anymore. The predominance of the market in Chile reflects the conceptual extinction of the dimension of the ‘public’ as exclusively associated with the state and a reconnection to both private and public universities. This has been accomplished in the economic, intellectual and political spheres of discourse and reinforced by a conservative media monopoly with the help of some academics who have play a key role in the definition of educational policies after the return to democracy (Joignant, 2011).

References

Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2008). When the press fails: Political power and the news media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brunner, J. J. (2014). Transformación de lo público y el reto de la innovación universitaria. Bordón revista de Pedadogía. Número monográfico Gobierno y gobernanza de la universidad: el debate emergente, 45-60. Cabalin, C. (2013). ‘Framing’ y políticas educacionales: Los medios como actores políticos en educación. Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico, 19(2), 635-647. Contraloría General de la República, (2012). Financiamiento Fiscal a la Educación Superior. Retrieved on May 19th 2016 from http://www.contraloria.cl/NewPortal2/portal2/ShowProperty/BEA%20Repository/Portal/Bases/Contabilidad/Estudios/Financiamiento_Fiscal_2012 Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Guzmán-Valenzuela, C. (2016). Unfolding the meaning of public (s) in universities: toward the transformative university. Higher Education, 71(5), 667-679. Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., & Barnett, R. (2013). Academic Fragilities in a marketised age: the Case of Chile. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(2), 203-220. Happer, C., & Philo, G. (2013). The role of the media in the construction of public belief and social change. Journal of social and political psychology, 1(1), 321-336. Joignant, A. (2011). The Politics of Technopols: Resources, Political Competence and Collective. Kremerman, M. & Páez, A. (2016). Endeudar para gobernar y mercantilizar: El caso del CAE. Santiago: Fundación Sol. Retrieved on October 30th 2016 from http://www.fundacionsol.cl/estudios/endeudar-gobernar-mercantilizar-caso-del-cae/ Lowrie, A. & Willmott, H. (2006). Marketing higher education. The promotion of relevance and the relevance of promotion. Social Epistemology, 20(3-4). 221-240. Naidoo, R., Shankar, A. & Ekant, V. (2011). The Consumerist Turn in Higher Education: Policy Aspirations and Outcomes. Journal of Marketing Management, 27(11/12), 1142-1162. OECD (2014). Education at a glance. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/edu/Educationat-a-Glance-2014.pdf Porta, E. D. & Cianci, M. (2016). Mediatization of the privatization processes of─ and in─ education in Latin America and the Caribbean: a study of media discourse. Educação & Sociedade, 37(134), 35-54. Servicio de Información de Educación Superior (SIES) (2014). Panorama de la Educación Superior en Chile 2014. Retrieved on December 15th from: http://www.mifuturo.cl/images/Estudios/Estudios_SIES_DIVESUP/panorama_de_la_educacion_superior_2014_sies.pdf Simbürger, E. (2013). Moving through the city: Visual discourses of upward social mobility in higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile. Visual Studies, 28(1), 67-77. Van Dijk, T. A. (1995). Discourse semantics and ideology. Discourse & Society, 6(2), 243-289.

Author Information

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela (presenting / submitting)

University of Chile, Chile

Elisabeth Simbürger (presenting)

Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile

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