Aseguramiento de la calidad en la educación superior de Chile: Alcance, implicaciones y aspectos críticos

Law 20129 on Quality Assurance, issued in 2006, was intended to regulate Chilean higher education system. Ten years later, the government of President Michelle Bachelet sent to the National Congress a project to reform higher education, which states the improvement of quality as one of its priorities. The purpose of this article is to analyze the scope and implications for the higher education quality assurance system linked to the new law. On the basis of the content analysis of both legal bodies, it is observed that their design does not obey a public policy that guides strategies for the quality’s improvement of higher education and that both lack a definition of agreed quality. The bill encourages the State to recover, in part, a greater role in the regulation of the quality assurance system, but also raises the requirement for institutional accreditation and for doctoral programs. It is concluded that the changes proposed in the bill respond only partially to what is needed in terms of quality assurance given that it does not ensure an exhaustive regulation of the tertiary system.