Chilean education is known as a market-driven, segregated, and highly privatized system. These characteristics have generated a complete reconfiguration of the higher education system, which is experienced by students as inequitable and unfair. The student movement has been a key actor in responding to this system through constant and often massive protests over the past 30 years. It has been especially during the last three governments.

Chilean education is known as a market-driven system. The application of market policies to the higher education sector led to a highly stratified system in two ways: on the one hand, institutional stratification that reproduces a scale of academic prestige, and on the other hand, a high socioeconomic differentiation of the student population between and within institutions. This doubly stratified character of Chilean higher education determines the type of educational experience to which young people have access.

Secondly, higher education in Chile exhibits a high level of privatization. Private universities account for 83 percent of Chilean students graduating with bachelor or equivalent degrees (also, practically 100 percent of nonuniversity postsecondary education students attend private institutions). In other words, public institutions represent only 17 percent of Chilean bachelor or equivalent graduates, being the most privatized educational system among OECD countries. Privatization is also tangible in funding, meaning that the economic burden of the expansion of higher education in Chile lays mainly on the shoulders of families and students. By 2012, only 22 percent of tertiary education funding in Chile was public, a proportion notably lower than the OECD average of 69 percent.

These structural characteristics have strongly reconfigured Chilean higher education, which is experienced by students as an inequitable system that does not promote public education and turns social mobility into an illusion. This perception has been the basis of student protest in recent decades, of student organizations’ demands, and of some of the recent public policies adopted in response to those demands.

Student Mobilization in Post-Dictatorship Chile

An additional feature of the Chilean educational system in recent decades has been its high level of conflict. The Chilean student movement can be considered a hybrid case of a social movement organization and an interest group. The Chilean student movement mixes—with different intensities—an extensive support network and a hierarchical coordination based on the Confederation of Students of Chile (CONFECH), which brings together the student federations of Chilean universities. CONFECH is the only national student organization, and spans more than 30 years of history. In 2021, CONFECH included 60 student federations.

Although their demands have varied over time, there has been a historical continuity, based on four principles. First, to expand and make access to higher education more egalitarian, demanding free university education and soft loans not linked to private banks. Second, to strengthen and expand public education through preferential treatment by the state. Third, to eradicate private for-profit institutions from the educational system and, more generally, the overdominant business approach in how the university system is managed. Finally, to increase the ability of the state to regulate and guide the higher education system and how it operates.

From an empirical study based on the analysis of protest events, we constructed the longest and most comprehensive series of student protest events in Chile in the postdictatorship period (1990–2019). According to our data, there were 908 protest events with the participation of university students during this period. University protests take place in Chile almost every year and, with a few exceptions, exceed 15 events per year, reaching more than 50 protests in the most active years (2000 and 2011). In the last two decades analyzed, there has been an increase in university protests: in 2006 and noticeably after 2010, protests became a genuinely mass phenomenon, with on average approximately 30,000 to 50,000 participants per protest.

Student protests have also acquired a more public character in recent years, with marches and other forms of street expression becoming the dominant tactic. Certainly, this massification and taking to public spaces anticipated renewed social mobilizations in Chile, with a climax in the so-called “Chilean Social Outbreak” in 2019. In fact, student protests have increasingly become more violent. According to our estimates, in the past decade, 25 percent of protests exhibited what can be considered as high levels of violence (including direct confrontations with the police, destruction of public or private property, and throwing molotov cocktails), compared to 12 percent in the 1990s. This process has been accompanied by greater and more aggressive police repression, generating further upheaval in the educational field.

An Effective and Influential Movement

Unlike other student movements, the Chilean student movement led by CONFECH has had a noticeable impact on the country’s educational policy in recent years. It triggered a social and political questioning of the existing institutional framework of market-driven education in Chile, spawning a process of change and reform that has been ongoing for a decade, especially during the last three governments.

Noticeably, President Bachelet (2014–2018) implemented a broad agenda of changes in the sector. She introduced the creation of two state universities and 16 regional technical education centers (the first public higher education institutions created in 40 years), the elimination of a law that prohibited student participation in university governance, and the enactment of legislation to improve coordination among state universities. President Bachelet also introduced three central policies that sought to promote a more equitable and inclusive education system: the 2016 law on free higher education that benefits students from the 60 percent lowest socioeconomic levels attending accredited institutions; the 2017 higher education law that improves regulation of this field; and the creation in 2016 of the Program for Accompaniment and Effective Access to Higher Education that facilitates university admission for high-performing high school students of low socioeconomic status.

The institutionalization of the student movement reached a remarkable historical point in 2022, when Gabriel Boric—one of the main student leaders of the 2011 movement—was elected president of Chile. He invited four important former CONFECH student leaders into his cabinet and appointed dozens of other former student actors to key government positions. Thus, the Chilean student movement has not only influenced the public agenda, but has also gained positions of state power, becoming a successful case of influence in higher education.

Politics, Society and Student Mobilization

The process of change promoted by the Chilean university student movement is of great interest, in comparative terms. Within the framework of a system that experienced accelerated massification, but whose dominant market dynamics structured it in a highly unequal and privatized manner, student organizations managed to modify the educational policy agenda and have occupied state power to reduce its neoliberal character.

To conclude, we propose three hypotheses on the relationship between politics, society, and the student movement based on the Chilean case. First, we can state that the discursive limits of the Chilean transition to democracy—marked by the creation of political consensus and the explicit or implicit acceptance of the neoliberal economy—have been overcome by the emergence of this new generation of actors who were able to articulate an alternative vision to the institutional frameworks imposed by the dictatorship. The student movement led by student organizations has expanded the horizons of what is possible for the whole of Chilean postdictatorship society, representing a social and generational movement with values, organizational strategies, and forms of action different from those of previous decades.

Second, neoliberal modernization has been accompanied by a widespread perception that social mobility opportunities remain barely accessible for the lower and middle social sectors, and a general sense of mistreatment, injustice, and discrimination. Moreover, the meritocratic promise appears to be broken, to the extent that access to good education itself is strongly dependent on economic conditions. Nevertheless, the student movement successfully contested the commercialization of education and sought to replace it with the demand for a welfare state that guarantees social rights.

Finally, the Chilean student movement encourages us to rethink the relationship between social movements, youth, and politics today. In a scenario marked by progressive separation between institutional and noninstitutional politics, the student movement appears to be a case of accelerated politicization. The demands of Chilean students also included issues related to healthcare and pension systems, showing how neoliberal policies affected other aspects of their lives and their families, and emphasizing the need for institutional transformation in all of these areas. This way, the student movement also triggered discussions on how the country is organized and its socioeconomic development, and has become a central actor in the new political era’s configuration.

Cristián Bellei is associate researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Education, University of Chile, Chile. E-mail: [email protected], X: cristianbellei

Cristóbal Villalobos is assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile. E-mail: [email protected].

This article is based on Bellei, C., & Villalobos, C. (2024). The Construction of a Political Actor in a Post-Dictatorship and Neoliberal Context: Persistence, Success, and Challenges of the Chilean Student Movement (1990–2020). In M. Klemenčič (Ed.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Student Politics and Representation in Higher Education (pp. 328–345). London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/encyclopedia-chapter?docid=b-9781350376007&tocid=b-9781350376007-chapter19 .