ALIKE

Think of thousands of thousands of young people eager to study at a university. Think of high fees as their main obstacle and loans as their only possibility to study. Think of families and students themselves struggling everyday not to leave the university. Think of those students twenty years later paying for the only possibility they had to study, most of them without having finished their careers. Think this have been happening for more than twenty years in a country named Chile, with seventeen millions of inhabitants and a prosperous economy. This is the heritage of Pinochet's regime: Figures like loans, professional institutes and for-profit universities congfigure a policy that has converted chilean higher education into one of the most expensive.

Such a model, based on offering the “service” of education through debt, is a tendency worldwide. The United States, for example, are deeply immersed in this dynamics that aim to have incomes from education: for-profit universities, low quality education and diminished working conditions for teachers are common place as well as very high tuitions. The business is so productive that students' debt in the United States is supposed to reach and overflow the amount of a trillion dollars this very year.

Colombian education has followed a similar path. ICETEX and FENALCO give loans to students and public universities offer services long time ago to fund themselves. However, the new educational system J. M. Santos, Colombia's president, proposed was intended to deepen this model to the detriment of the idea of education as a right. Just alike.