The Construction of Inclusive Higher Education in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina: Institutional Strategies and Students' Perspectives.

In the period 2007-2015, 17 new national public universities were created in Argentina, 8 of which are located in Greater Buenos Aires. This is a sign of political commitment with the expansion of university education offer, since they are placed in territories where there was no university previously. These institutions were born with an inclusive mandate: to create the conditions for the access to university of groups traditionally excluded (exclusion related with social, gender, ethnic inequalities).

In order to respond to this mandate, these institutions carried out a reflection on traditional university practices and generated innovations in institutional structures, in student orientation and support dispositives and in teacher training. They also intended to build a close link with the communities where they are located, in terms of knowledge transfer and technological linkage. In this paper we intend to critically analyze these strategies in two of these new universities of Greater Buenos Aires, to identify their achievements and their deficiencies regarding democratization of higher education.

To do this, we do not only resort to institutional documents and in-depth interviews with university authorities in charge of different institutional areas, but we also seek to put this institutional perspective in counterpoint with the perspective of students from disadvantaged groups. The latter allow us to explore the challenges these students encounter in accessing university and developing their career. We also analyze how the institutional strategies implemented respond to students’ needs, and which challenges remain disregarded.

In order to grasp students' perspective, we have collected life stories from junior and advanced students of Social Sciences and Health Sciences. The reconstruction of educational, family and labor trajectories has allowed us to understand the university experience in the context of their whole life experience.