Partial Free Higher Education As a Renunciation of Policy Universalism: The Chilean Promise of Access to He Studies

Promising to enhance social justice in the country, Chile introduced a free higher education (FHE) reform in 2016, marking a departure from its longstanding embrace of neoliberal social policies. This paper aims to analyse how and why an ostensibly incompatible FHE policy gained rhetorical support within a predominantly neoliberal framework. The FHE reform emerged as a policy solution to a social crisis driven by a student movement advocating for public, universal free, and high-quality higher education. The political system accepted the challenge and focused on the demand for FHE, relegating the public orientation and quality of higher education to a subsidiary role, while aiming to increase national equity by easing the financial burden through free-of-charge access. The most disadvantaged candidates were expected to have better opportunities to improve their future socioeconomic situation through access to higher education. The debate around higher education centred on this reform, with its universal scope becoming a key element in the discussion. After analysing editorials, opinion columns from leading newspapers, and interviews with key higher education stakeholders describing the FHE implementation process, our findings suggest that the abandonment of the policy's universal scope is crucial to understanding how and why FHE became a viable possibility within Chile’s neoliberal policy landscape. The idea of a partial FHE implementation emerged as a convenient policy arrangement, where civic demands for "education as a right" could be reconciled with market-based principles—such as the voucher system and targeting in HE financing. These justifications for the FHE policy offer an opportunity to understand new neoliberal forms. Aligned with what Ong has described as exceptions to neoliberalism, FHE policy has emerged as an institutional arrangement that grant legitimacy to neoliberal social relations.