Santiago de Chile
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has been championing the complete overhaul of the nation's education system. This past
December:
Chile’s Minister of Interior Rodrigo Peñailillo announced Thursday that university education will be free by 2016.
“In March 2016 we will start with the free higher education, now that we have the resources [to implement the reform], as we approved the fiscal reform,” said Peñailillo.
Before everyone decides they want to live in Chile, let's not forget that the reason this is happening is
student and electoral protests and pressure.
With business-friendly policies and largely privatized education and health care, the “Chilean model” has helped build a stable country with little unemployment or corruption, and per capita incomes nearing $20,000, the highest in Latin America.
But it also has given Chile some of thehighest levels of inequality in the developed world.
President Michelle Bachelet was given a mandate by the people:
President Michelle Bachelet, who returned to the country’s top office in March after a landslide win, is tasked with fixing the model — in effect, rescuing Chilean capitalism from its excesses.
With her New Majority coalition in control of Congress, Bachelet is moving ahead on a tax overhaul aimed at softening the extremes of Chile’s economic outcomes. By closing loopholes for the wealthy and raising corporate taxes, her government plans to collect billions in new revenue and offer free, universal education. Bachelet told Chileans in a speech last month that the goal is a “more cohesive, democratic and just society.”
And students and their parents have not stopped reminding her and their government that privatizing everything and not spending on public education and works is unacceptable.
The anger exploded into student-led street protests in 2011 and 2012 that rattled the country and won broad sympathy among Chile’s middle class. The biggest target of the protesters’ fury was one of the pillars of the Chilean model: the country’s top-rated but mostly private higher education system.
Chile’s universities are among the most expensive in the world, at least relative to average income, and a lack of financial aid leaves most of the costs on the shoulders of students’ families. Nearly one-third of students drop out before completing their degrees, but their loans — often from private banks that charge relatively high rates — don’t disappear.
[bold my emphasis]
We are talking about Chile, not America. This is our future so we can step up early or we can continue down the path we are going until there is fire in the streets—but it will happen.