EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS AND DIVERSITY:

Chile’s Private Universities in International Perspective

By

Andrés Bernasconi

WP No. 4, November 2004

Andrés Bernasconi, Dean of the Law School, Universidad de Talca, Chile, and PROPHE Collaborating Scholar.

* A list of PROPHE working papers and currently published papers are available online at PROPHE website http://www.albany.edu/~prophe/publication/paper.html. Hard copies of the working papers are available upon request.

Program for Research On Private Higher Education

Educational Administration & Policy Studies

University at Albany, State University of New York

1400 Washington Ave

Albany, New York 12222

Fax: 1-518-442-5084

Email: prophe@albany.edu

ABSTRACT

The expansion of private sectors of higher education has usually been regarded as a factor of diversification in higher education systems. Some of this differentiation has been associated, but without systematic study, to the affiliation of private institutions with organizations outside the field of higher education. This article reports the results of a study of this form of interorganizational relationship in private universities in Chile. Cases include universities founded or sponsored by religious, business and military organizations.

A typology of private universities is proposed, on the basis of the forms affiliation (or its absence), was observed to take in the cases examined. Weak and strong forms of affiliation are described, and affiliated universities are compared to “proprietary” universities, i.e., those owned by individuals who govern them from their positions in the board of directors, and “independent” universities, in which governance lies with internal –academic or administrative—constituents. Albeit derived from the case of Chile, the typology could be applied to the analysis of private higher education in other national systems. The second part of the article seeks to ascertain whether affiliation operates as a source of differentiation in Chilean private higher education.

Results show that, compared to the other types of private universities, the affiliated ones possess distinctive mission statements and declarations of principles, consistent with the orientations of their sponsor institutions, tend to be smaller, and tend to have more full-time and better qualified faculty. Some receive financial support from their sponsor organization or its members. Distinctiveness was not found in indicators of prestige and student selectivity, nor in tuition levels, program offerings, curriculum design, the weight of research and graduate programs in their functions, student socioeconomic profile, and faculty involvement in governance. This is not to say that there are no differences in these dimensions among private universities: much diversity exists, but most of it cuts across all categories of interest for our study.

1. Introduction: diversity in the growth of private higher education internationally

The growth of private higher education worldwide, and the new forms it has adopted to carry out that expansion, has confronted scholarship with the challenge of reconsidering the theme of private provision and the diversification of higher education.

            The literature on private higher education internationally shows that private higher education brings diversity, especially when compared to the public tertiary education sector, along the dimensions of finance, control, mission, and scope of functions.[i] We know that, in general, private universities rely on a narrower range of financial sources than publics, with tuition fees as the paramount resource. Their governance is more hierarchical, less internally democratic, responsive to a tighter array of constituencies, and freer from governmental action and political influence. Their missions are typically oriented to particular interests, niches, clienteles, or tasks. Program offerings at private universities tend to cluster around fewer disciplines than in public institutions, and rely more heavily on part time faculty, especially in developing nations.[ii]

            This public-private divide is a very clear source of diversity in the higher education system, and the one that has attracted the most scholarly attention to date. Yet, as private sectors of higher education expand, both within national systems, and globally, the question of diversity within private sectors becomes as relevant as the issue of private-public distinctiveness. The United States offers a very clear and long-standing case of private sector differentiation based, among other factors, on mix of funding and scope of functions, which allows, for instance, distinctions such as Geiger’s (1986: 4), between research universities, liberal arts colleges, and urban service universities, or Altbach’s (1999: 3), who, using a different classificatory scheme, sorts United States private institutions into elite research and liberal arts, religiously affiliated, and proprietary.

            But different institutional profiles in the private provision of higher education are not, by any means, limited to the United States. Indeed, it seems that everywhere scholars have looked closely at a particular national system, or cross nationally at more than one system, they have found significant variability within the private sectors of higher education. For instance, examining higher education in Latin America, and looking into institutions’ historical roots, patterns of governance, scope of functions, and finance, Levy (1986a) distinguishes three types of private institutions, corresponding to three waves of private sector growth: Catholic, elite secular, and demand absorbing. Geiger, in turn, in his comparative study of the private sectors of higher education in eight European and Asian countries, finds that “diversity arises naturally in private sectors from the varied purposes for which these institutions were founded, and from the independence that private control allows in the pursuit of these ends” (1986: 241). Writing on the current situation of private higher education in Eastern Europe, Tomusk (2003: 229-235) recognizes three types of private universities in that region, according to the manner in which their founding purposes relate to their national context: (i) private universities created to challenge the remnants of the Soviet order and ideology (Soros’ Central European University, for instance), (ii) universities seeking to offer new forms of organization, or new programs and degrees (such as MBAs), and (iii) profit-seeking, demand-absorbing universities, both independent, and affiliated with public universities. Religious vs. secular, and for-profit vs. nonprofit loom large as main cleavages among private institutions in the Far East (Gonzalez, 1999; James, 1991; Lee, 1999), while in India, the key differentiating factor seems to be the uneven spread of public funding across the private sector (Tilak, 1999).

            Although diversity is the predominant finding, instances of lack of diversity have also been examined and systematized (Levy, 1999; Teixeira and Amaral, 2001). First, there is the well known tendency of higher education institutions, public or private, to imitate the most prestigious universities in aspects that are deemed crucial for enhancing legitimacy. Additionally, private universities usually find suitable models in other private universities, as do publics in their peers. Thirdly, private universities may adopt organizational or functional features from private organizations in sectors other than higher education, a phenomenon much associated, these days, with the idea of privatization. Lastly, while the competitive environment of present day higher education opens new market niches that require fresh approaches to programs and services, it can also breed risk-averse strategies of survival among institutions.

Generally speaking, diversity within the private sector, as well as between privates and publics, arises from loose state regulation, very limited reliance on public funding, national policies supporting diversification in higher education (backed by the multilateral banks throughout the nineties), a decline in the legitimacy of the state and its public universities—part ideology, part “state failure,” and part, finally, public universities’ perceived inefficiency—and the ascent of alternative sources of legitimacy, and finally, of course, a diversity of goals and tasks undertaken by the private sector of higher education (Levy 2002, 2004). It is the latter impetus for diversification that this paper engages. While in the past four decades or so many (perhaps most) private institutions of higher education worldwide have emerged as individual or family undertakings, others have been created by a religious organization, a business concern, a philanthropic foundation, or other institutions whose reach extends beyond education, and for whom the university is but one of the means at their disposal to further their larger missions. This “affiliation” of a university with an organization outside of education may foster distinctiveness by supplying the university with a sense of mission, economic resources, human talent, a set of goals and policies, a development strategy, and a source of legitimacy that comes not from the field of higher education, but from the association of the university with a socially recognized institution.[iii] Moreover, a sponsor institution may establish more than one university, which may diverge in form or function, as a matter of design, or as a result of their evolution over time.[iv]

These expectations of goal-based differentiation within higher education are in large measure, even if implicitly, based on theories of rational organizational behavior. Rational systems theory views organizations as tools for an efficient attainment of well defined goals. Goals direct the design of the structure, and this, in turn, is a highly formalized—i.e., impersonal—set of rules, roles, tasks, and procedures aimed at standardizing and coordinating the actions of individuals within the organization, and make them predictable and controllable, so things can get done efficiently (Aldrich and Pfeffer, 1976; Blau, 1970; Donaldson, 2001; Meyer, 1979: 481-486; Ulrich and Barney, 1984).

This approach has been increasingly challenged, in theory and empirically, by the new institutionalism in the sociology of organizations, which dispute the idea that mission, fitness of task to purpose, and deliberate adaptive response to the environment are the main guides for organizational structure and change. Instead, the critics posit that organizations lacking unambiguous goals, identifiable and measurable outputs produced through routinized procedures of coordination and control, and clearly understood relationships between those goals and the appropriate means for achieving them (i.e., a precisely defined technology), model themselves after other organizations, either because they are pressured to conform to a legitimate model by external organizations upon which the receiving organization is dependent, or because they copy organizations which they perceive to be more successful or consolidated, and thus, legitimate players in the same organizational field, or because of the standardization of norms and activities brought about by professionalization of personnel. This mimicking of rules, procedures, strategies, and structures make these “institutionalized” organizations similar in form, culture, and output, without necessarily making them more efficient. It breeds homogeneity well past the point where copying increases performance. New institutionalism predicts extensive homogeneity, brought about by “isomorphic” behavior across organizations in the same field (Di Maggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and Di Maggio, 1991; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1983, 1987).

In Levy (1999, 2004) and Bernasconi (2003, 2004) the new institutionalism framework has been deployed for the analysis of diversification in private higher education, and its value affirmed as a heuristic device. It has been found that institutional influence pushes private universities, at least in some respects, to emulate the mainstream, traditional universities, (mostly public, but prestigious privates too), or other privates, or private institutions in sectors other than higher education, as long as those model organizations are perceived as successful and legitimate, but there is nonetheless  much goal-based decision making, purposeful adjustment to competitive environments, and technical rationality as well. Moreover, in line with rational behavior organizational theory, empirical findings in this field suggest that diversity is ample and growing, notwithstanding the strong institutional pressures and their isomorphic results, which makes, for instance, private universities resemble their public counterparts in many more ways one could have anticipated by consideration of their different goals and environments.

The forms affiliation might take as a dimension of a university’s control structure, and the effects of affiliation upon the functions of a university, have not received much attention in the literature on private higher education and diversification. Consequently, it is necessary to turn to the scholarship on organizations for guidance. In this realm, our concept of “affiliation” seems to fall within the well established, although much broader notion of “interorganizational relationships” (Hall, 2002: 217-235). These relationships encompass a vast array of linkages among organizations, from market coordination mechanisms, such as supply contracts and supply chains, to operational partnerships (joint ventures, franchising, consortia, strategic alliances), all the way to ownership of one organization by another. In terms of the number of organizations involved, these cooperative arrangements may involve from just two organizations in a dyadic relationship, up to several organizations forming a network. We shall be concerned here with dyadic relationships, and with ownership or other similarly strong forms of linkages.

The literature on interorganizational relationships has focused, among other issues, on the types of interdependence and on the motivations or determinants of the relationships (for example, Schmidt and Kochan, 1977; Hall et al., 1977, Oliver, 1990). As our discussion of university affiliations proceeds, these research results will be called upon as necessary to illustrate relevant parallels between affiliation and the general framework of interorganizational relationships. Yet, it bears mentioning at the outset that, in spite of the ongoing expansion of the literature on interorganizational relationships, little is known of their outcomes, and more specifically, their impact on innovation (Hage, 1999:611), and on organizational diversification. Moreover, the literature on interorganizational relationships has so far paid limited attention to universities as a field for empirical study.[v]

With this background, this paper seeks, first, to describe and classify the forms in which affiliation expresses itself in the control structure of a private university, a problem which has not yet been systematically studied, either in the scholarship on private higher education, or in the literature on interorganizational relationships. Secondly, we seek to expand the understanding of diversification within private sectors of higher education, by focusing on similarities and distinctiveness across the types of private universities in Chile, one of the world’s leaders in higher education privatization. We examine if a university’s mission and principles, functions, finances, and governance structures are influenced by the university’s affiliation to a religious, business, military institution, or any other organization outside education. The main hypothesis is that if the sponsor or supporting external institution helps the university steady its course along a route consistent with its mission and goals, thus serving as a counterbalance (an anchor of sorts) to the homogenizing forces characteristic of higher education, one would expect affiliated universities to exhibit greater capacity to develop and sustain unique organizational and functional features than their non-affiliated peers. As a corollary, one would expect to find more of this capacity in strongly affiliated universities than in weakly affiliated ones.

            The paper ensues according to the following structure. First, a panoramic view of Chilean private higher education is provided for context. Next, I pose the main research questions, and explain the data sources and methods. Then, I present a typology of private universities, based on the concept of affiliation, and explore its relationship to previous typologies. The topic of differentiation, along the dimensions mission and principles, scope of functions, finances, and governance structures is then broached, and the paper concludes by surveying the relevance of the results of this research for the private higher education literature, and for the scholarship on interorganizational relationships.

2. Private higher education in Chile

Before the expansion of the private sector began in earnest in the 1980s as part of the sweeping privatization program of General. Pinochets de facto regime (1973-1990), the Chilean higher education system was composed of eight universities, two public and six private which, their different juridical statuses notwithstanding, exhibited a high (and quite unusual for Latin America) degree of homogeneity (Levy, 1986a). The reform process initiated in 1980, intent on expanding enrollments, differentiating the higher education system and bolstering competition, authorized the creation of new private universities, and transformed the regional branches of the public University of Chile and Universidad Técnica del Estado into fourteen independent public universities. The private sector responded rapidly, driving up the number of institutions to a peak of over 300 a decade later. During the nineties and into the first years of the new century a combination of stronger regulation, financial failure, and acquisitions trimmed down the population of institutions by some 20% (Table 1).[vi]

Today, there are in Chile 16 public universities, 9 private universities founded between 1888 and 1956, “old privates” in Table No. 1, and 36 new private universities established after the reform began in 1980, together with 163 non-university postsecondary institutions, all of them private.[vii] The private sector represents 92% of the total number of institutions of higher education, and 72% of the institutions in the university sector. Private institutions enroll over 70% of Chile’s more than half million postsecondary students, with private universities responsible for over 60% of total university enrollments, one of the highest proportions in Latin America.

TABLE No. 1: Number of higher education institutions in Chile, by type and sector: 1980-2003

Category		1980	1985	1990	1995	2000	2003
A. Private Institutions		6	146	286	254	224	208
	1. Universities	6	9	46	54	48	45
	"Old" Private Universities	6	6	6	9	9	9
	"New" private universities	0	3	40	45	39	36
	2. Non-university postsecondary	0	137	240	200	176	163
	Professional Institutes	0	19	79	73	60	48
	Technical Training Centers	0	118	161	127	116	115
B. Public Institutions		2	18	16	16	16	16
	1. Universities	2	12	14	16	16	16
	2. Non-university postsecondary	0	6	2	0	0	0
	Professional Institutes	0	6	2	0	0	0
C.Total (private and public)		8	164	302	270	240	224
	1. Universities	8	21	60	70	64	61
	2. Non-university postsecondary	0	143	242	200	176	163

Sources: Years 1980-2000: Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE), www.albany.edu/~prophe. Year 2003: Ministry of Education, Chile. Compendio de la Educación Superior: www.mineduc.cl

Both public and private universities established prior to the 1981 reform receive direct funding subsidies form the government,[viii] and given their public service missions and functions they have been traditionally considered part of the public sector of higher education. Those “quasi public” private universities will not concern us here.[ix] Instead, the focus will be on the private universities established since 1982, the “new privates” in Table No. 1. These institutions fund themselves almost exclusively through tuition fees, and their students are not eligible for government-subsidized student aid money, but they can participate in the distribution of governmental competitive funds by winning research grants or enrolling top-scoring students. In any event, these sources of revenue are negligible for the vast majority of private universities.

Private universities must be legally established as not-for-profit organizations, and as such are exempt from income tax. All Chilean private universities are, therefore, not profit seeking as a matter of legal definition. As in other countries where private universities are required to be nonprofit, many university owners in Chile have found ways to obtain returns to their investments, without formally violating the law.[x]

Chilean scholarship on higher education (Apablaza and Lavados, 1988; Brunner et al., 1992; Brunner, 1993; Lemaitre, 1995) has highlighted how the differences in finances, juridical status, and regulatory environment between public and private universities have resulted in organizational diversity between the two sectors. Little attention has been paid to potential diversity within the private sector, partly because of the glaring similarities in the most ostensible features of privates: absence of a research function, reliance on part time faculty, verticality of command, emphasis on teaching programs not requiring expensive equipment or infrastructure, and the like.

However, after 20 years of development a few private universities are managing to set themselves apart from the stereotype. They have opened programs in the natural sciences all the way to the doctoral level, invested heavily in infrastructure and equipment, opened Medical Schools, and housed small, full-time research teams (Bernasconi, 2003).

One of the few studies of private universities in Chile using primary sources is Pérsico and Pérsico’s (1994). Their survey-based research finds great heterogeneity within the private sector, in terms of institutional size, infrastructure, equipment, tuition fees, admission requirements, faculty credentials, and numbers of administrative staff. This study, albeit important in its major finding about intrasectoral diversity, and interesting in its use of primary sources, lacks an exploration of possible sources for this heterogeneity. Therefore, we don’t know whether such diversity is a result of design, chance or, more likely, different stages of maturity in the development of the surveyed institutions. A more recent study of the academic profession in Chile (Bernasconi, 2003) comparing faculty recruitment, appointment, workload, evaluation, and compensation, in public and private universities, finds that rational organizational behavior and diversity predominates in intersectoral comparison and also within each sector (public and private).

3. Research questions, data, and methods

The main research questions are 1) What are the organizational forms through which private universities establish linkages of dependence with institutions outside higher education?, and 2) Is the affiliation of private universities to external organizations a source of diversification in the missions, governance structures, and functions of private universities?.

To identify a workable subset of private universities likely to fit the notion of an affiliated institution, a questionnaire was mailed to eight scholars, university officials and civil servants knowledgeable about Chilean private universities. Recipients were asked to check from the list of all private universities in Chile, those which they believed were linked by ownership, shared governance, or sponsorship, with another institution, and those which they believed to be free of such relationships. Thirteen universities were marked in the first group by five or more respondents, while four were assigned by four or more experts to the second group. Other universities received fewer mentions in either group.

The second stage consisted of a study of the legal documents (articles of association, bylaws, and governmental licenses) of the seventeen universities thus selected to investigate the exact nature of their postulated relationship with an external organization. This process narrowed down the group to the final list of eight affiliated and two non-affiliated universities reported here.

The existence of affiliation is taken as the “independent” variable, and the “dependent” variables are the universities’ mission statements, governance structures, funding patterns, and functions. Archival research on mission statements, catalogues, advertising material, and websites, were combined with interviews, in the universities which accepted our visit,[xi] with board members, rectors, vice-rectors, and deans, to clarify the characteristics of the institution’s affiliation, and seek evidence of its influence on its organization and functions.

4. A typology of private universities

From the point of view of their juridical organization, as expressed in their articles of association, bylaws, and other legal sources, the 36 private universities in Chile can be sorted into three types of control structure (or “ownership”, writ large):

a) Affiliated. Some private universities were established by one or more sponsoring institutions, who defined the university’s mission and governance structure, and retained ultimate control over the university through their sole or majority participation in the governing board. A few others were created by individuals who, albeit placing themselves or their appointees in control of the university, agreed to relinquish part of their authority in favor of another institution called upon to strengthen the institutional support of the university or to assume some form of tutelage over the university’s fidelity to its founding principles. I have identified eight universities in this category, which I shall call “affiliated.” They constitute the main focus of this study.[xii]

b) Proprietary. A second, much larger group, is composed of universities founded by individuals, and controlled solely by those same founders, or their appointees or successors. These universities I shall call “proprietary,” although no implication about profit motive is intended with this designation. As stated above, all private universities in Chile are required by law to organize themselves as not-for-profit, tax-exempt organizations. Some of them are also, in practice, not for gain, but the majority are profit-oriented, either exclusively, or concurrently with other, less materialistic goals. But whatever they may be and do, it is the owners who decide, and in that sense they are “universities with owners,” or proprietary universities. Universities in neither the affiliated category nor in the following one, can be said to fall into this category.

c) Independent. Lastly, two private universities originally belonging in the proprietary, not-for-profit group, evolved into a different power configuration which sets them apart from the other two groups and can only be conceptualized as a third type of control structure. In these universities power is generated from within the organization, and the governing board in controlled by internal parties. These universities I shall call “independent.”

Therefore, for the purposes of this study, a university is considered to be affiliated in the following cases: a) STRONG AFFILIATION, when the external organization appears in the articles of association and other foundational legal documents of the university as a founder of the institution or as a member of its governing board; these are cases in which the university is totally or partially “owned” by the external organization. b) WEAK AFFILIATION: cases of a formal relationship between an external institution and the university whereby, as a minimum, a sponsoring, tutelage or advisory role has been conferred upon the external organization by the governing bodies of the university.

            As noted above, concepts of affiliation similar to these have been broadly used in the study of private higher education to refer to colleges and universities associated with religious organizations, but not to refer to an organic relationship between a college and some other type of institution (philanthropic, business, military, etc.).

            Strong affiliation corresponds to what Longest (1990:21), writing about interorganizational linkages in the health sector, calls co-opting: the placing of representatives of one organization in the governing board of another. More generally, the phenomenon has been studied in the business sector under the banner of “interlocking boards of directors” (Hall, 2002:230-234). In the case of our notion of strong affiliation, however, the control by another organization of the university’s board is a manifestation of an ownership relationship, not just a strategic move. Weak affiliation, in turn can be considered as a form of coalescing, defined by Longest (Ibid.) as “the partial pooling of resources by two or more organizations to pursue defined goals.” This form of loose coupling between organizations allow them to maintain their identities and functional autonomies, while ensuring a stability of relationships above and beyond what market transactions may procure. Strong and weak affiliation can also be understood as two degrees of “relationship magnitude,” a construct proposed by Golicic, Foggin and Mentzer to denote “the extent or degree of closeness or strength of the relationship” (2003:61) between two organizations.         The notion of affiliation proposed here requires that the sponsoring entity be an organization, not just an array of interests, a social class, or a social movement. Thence, while many private institutions see as their essential mission to prepare their students for a job, we would not consider them affiliated with the firms that hire their graduates. Similarly, although public universities created in Latin America in the nineteenth century sought to affirm the idea on a nation, we would not consider them affiliated with nationalism. More generally, our concept of affiliation requires much more than the engagement of an institution with a cause, or accountability to a set of external constituencies. It requires, in its strong form, ownership and control, and formal tutelage or sponsorship in the weak form, and in any case the controlling or sponsoring entity must be an organization, thus capable of purposeful action.

Within the much larger group of non-affiliated universities, the focus is on the polar opposite of the affiliated group: what I shall call “independent” universities. In these universities, as it will be explained in greater detail below, power is generated from within the organization, and the governing board in controlled by internal stakeholders. Although only two private universities fit this type in Chile, they matter here inasmuch as they epitomize non-affiliation (and as cases that may be more common in certain other countries), and will therefore serve as a “control group.” Whatever characteristics are hypothesized about affiliated institutions by reason of their affiliation, ought to be found missing, or much more diluted, in their opposites.

The bulk of private universities in Chile are neither affiliated nor independent. They are owned by individuals who govern them from their positions on the board of directors and sometimes also from executive positions inside the organization. In this sense, they can be considered “proprietary”, although the designation does not necessarily entail a profit-seeking motive. We will not examine them on a case-by-case basis given that their type has been relatively more studied the recent international literature on private higher education (Altbach, 1999; Balán and García de Fanelli, 1997), and that this paper is concerned rather with the consequences of affiliation. Proprietary institutions will be considered as a reference, but mostly in their aggregate functional features as manifested in national statistics on faculty, students and programs, with only a few cases subject to individual analysis.

This use of “independent” and “proprietary” deviates from United States convention, where “independent” is sometimes synonymous with private, and proprietary is commonly associated with for-profit. The deviation is justified, for not every private institution is independent, certainly not in Chile, as this papers shows, and likewise not in other countries with new private institutions, but not even in the United States, although the limits to independence are more salient in nations where regulation of conflicting interests is not as developed as in the United States, which is to say, pretty much everywhere else. And then, conceptually speaking, not every institution with a proprietor has to be for profit. It all depends on the intentions of the proprietor. Moreover, the ideas behind the concepts of affiliated, proprietary and independent are easily comprehensible, even if under other names, as when Altbach, explaining the ownership structure of private institutions, writes (1999:6, text within brackets, added):

In some cases, the university is “owned” by a sponsoring organization [affiliated], in other by the academic staff and administrators [proprietary, if owned by administrators], and still in others by boards of trustees  or governors that may be partly composed of academics or may be dominated by outsiders.

This is, to the best of my knowledge, a novel categorization of private higher education institutions, both for Chile, and internationally. While it resonates with Levy’s (1986a) widely accepted three waves of establishment of private institutions of higher education in Latin America (Catholic, elite secular, and demand absorbing), or more generally, religious/cultural, elite, and non elite (Levy, 1992) ours deals with a portion of private higher education that chronologically corresponds basically to Levy’s demand absorbing wave. In this sense, it seeks to capture more recent developments in the evolution of private higher education. In terms of its relationship with the structure of the higher education systems, the typology offered here would correspond to Geiger’s (1986) “mass” private sector, but his is a typology of sectors, not institutions, and does not follow a basic time sequence of sector evolution. Geiger does offer a similar trilogy when writing about the Philippines: proprietary, sectarian, and nonprofit (1986:6), where “sectarian” could stand for “affiliated” (although affiliated is preferable because it sounds more value-neutral), but “nonprofit” cannot stand for “independent” without disfiguring the content of the latter concept.

Secondly, while Levy’s categorization is based on multiple factors related to causes of growth and main driving forces, which lead to certain patterns in function, governance, and finance, and Geiger fuses the criteria of profits with the notion of service to a sectarian interest, the typology offered here is based on a single classificatory variable, control structure, which seems to be essential for private institutions anywhere, and offers a premium for parsimony and universality, even if at a price in breadth.

            Finally, classificatory categories currently employed in the literature on private higher education often overlap, and are usually country- or region-specific; for instance:

a) elite universities, non-elite universities, and non-university postsecondary institutions, mostly applied in Latin America (Balán and García de Fanelli, 1997; Castro and Navarro, 1999; Cosentino de Cohen, 2003; Kent and Ramírez, 1999, Levy 1986a);

b) for profits vs. non-profits, where profits are legally authorized, as in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, or South Africa (Lee, 1999; Gonzalez, 1999; James, 1991; Levy 2003);

c) and religious vs. secular institutions, in Latin America, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and potentially in any country where important religious cleavages exist (Gonzalez, 1999; Levy 1986a).

The classification proposed here adds to those above, enlarging the analytic toolkit with a set of categories that appears to be readily suitable to empirical deployment cross nationally.

 Affiliated universities

As anticipated above, two forms of affiliation can be discerned from the foundational documents of Chilean private universities. The “strong” form consists of the establishment of the university by its sponsor organizations, who retain control over it through their sole or dominant participation in the university’s governing board.[xiii] The five cases are:

· Universidad Adventista, UAD, created in 1990 by the Chilean branch of the Church of the Seventh Day Adventists, and presently controlled by that church and an Adventist social services agency called AADRA.

· Universidad Católica Cardenal Raúl Silva Henríquez, UCSH, established in 1990 by the Chilean Catholic Conference of Bishops, which in 1993 invited the Salesian (St. Francis de Sales) Congregation to join in as a partner in the ownership of the university.

· Universidad Alberto Hurtado, UAH, created in 1996 by the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), together with 3 Jesuit educational foundations, and seven Jesuit priests.

· Universidad Marítima de Chile, UMAR, created in 1990 by the Chilean Navy through its Chief of Staff and the Navy’s educational Carlos Condell Foundation. [xiv]

· The Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, UAI, founded in 1998 by the Adolfo Ibáñez Foundation and the Alumni Association of the Valparaíso Business School (a predecessor of the university), is perhaps the less clear cut case of affiliation, for its founding institutions have in their role in the establishment and running of the university their practically unique missions, and their reasons of existence are much more completely absorbed by the university than is the case with the sponsor institutions of the other affiliated universities. However, UAI merits inclusion in this group because the Adolfo Ibáñez Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Ibáñez family of businesspeople and main shareholders in one of Chile’s largest chain of supermarkets. In brief, UAI is affiliated with a business holding. At least one member of the Ibáñez family is always on the Board, and family members have also been rectors of the university.[xv]

The three examples of the “weak” form of affiliation, in turn, are:

· Universidad La República, ULR, organized in 1988 by a group of members of the Great Lodge of Chile, the national organization of the Chilean Freemasonry. Part of its articles of association read as follows:

The Great Master of the Great Lodge of Chile is the patron of the Universidad La República. The patron represents the existence and immutability of the socio-ethical ties that link the Universidad La República with the Chilean Masonic Order, and in such position, it is his responsibility for supervising the university’s continuous fulfillment of its purposes, and for keeping and fostering those links for the benefit of the noble goals that inspire both institutions (art. 5, articles of association).[xvi]

For someone to elect or be elected to the fourteen-member Board of the university, he has to be an active member of the Great Lodge of Chile. Currently, the rector of the University is also the Great Master of the Great Lodge of Chile, but this is not mandatory according to the university’s bylaws.

· Universidad de los Andes, ULA, established in 1989 by a group of individuals who were members or sympathizers of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, who stated in the articles of association that:

By accord of the organizers the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei has the moral responsible over the Christian education which will be offered to all members of the university, and will provide spiritual care for all who would freely require it.

The individuals who organized the university became its first board, with the obligation to replace two of its members every year.

· Universidad Finis Terrae, UFT, started out as a proprietary university in 1987. After twelve years of operation the owners, facing the need to ensure the continuation of the university past their lifetimes, and to secure the economic backing to sustain its growth over the long run, decided to let the Legion of Christ, a Roman Catholic congregation, into the ownership of the university in exchange for the economic contribution necessary to fund the university’s physical plant development. As a result of this agreement, in 1999 the Legion of Christ acquired the right to appoint 12 of the 24 members of the Board, while the other seats remained in control of the original founders.

UFT’s affiliation cannot be considered a case of the strong form inasmuch as the power of the sponsor organization is shared with a group of individuals who are not members, and not necessarily sympathizers, of that organization. The Legion of Christ, unlike the Navy or the Jesuits with their universities, needs to reach agreements with their partners in UFT to exert their power over the institution. The strongly affiliated universities, on the other hand, are totally controlled by one organization.

The predominance of religious linkages among affiliated universities is notable, but I shall refrain to attempt explanations which would take us far beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is clear that Chile reflects a theme emerging from the contemporary study of private higher education, namely, the new wave of religious institutions, which not only cater to the dominant religion, as in the past. In this sense, religious affiliation can be seen as more pluralistic than before, for there are more institutional options for the diversity of the faithful, but perhaps less pluralistic as well, for this niche fragmentation could lead away from the “big tent” mentality towards which religiously inspired universities evolved over time, as their religious mission declined, and distinctiveness receded.[xvii] The new religiously affiliated institutions are much less important to their national systems that their predecessors of yesteryear, but the half-life of their niche distinctiveness might hold for longer, maintaining over time the intrasectoral diversity they brought with their inception. It shall be interesting then to see if the new religiously affiliated privates maintain their affiliated profile in the years to come.

Proprietary universities

Proprietary universities are a variegated category. As has been observed in other cases of private growth, some were organized by professors from public universities, others by owners of proprietary secondary schools seeking to prolong and elevate their educational endeavors, many were established on the basis of a pre-existing non-university postsecondary institution, others respond to their founder’s desire to propagate their ideological or political visions, and probably a majority are business operations covered by a layer of academic pursuit of varied degrees of thickness.

Good examples, from opposite sides of the political-ideological spectrum, are Universidad ARCIS and Universidad del Desarrollo. ARCIS leaders explained to me how the university was founded in the early eighties by a group of leftist intellectuals, artists, and professionals, as a shelter of sorts for academics harassed for political reasons in the Pinochet-era public universities. Its program offerings emphasize the fine arts, philosophy, and the social sciences, and it includes several masters’ programs with enrollments of 1,800 and a doctorate offered jointly with a French university. Leaders of ARCIS are proud of the experimental, iconoclastic nature of some of their approaches to teaching, especially in the Arts. The university has a powerful single union for faculty, clerical, and administrative personnel, and elected representatives of the faculty, students and staff participate in school and university-wide governing bodies. Property of ARCIS is diluted among 40 shareholders, all of which are prominent members of Chile’s progressive intelligentsia. According to administrators, its close to 5,000 undergraduate students choose ARCIS lured by the “alternative” flavor of its programs, the downtown location of the campus, and its relaxed discipline.

Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD) was originally established in 1989 in Concepción, Chile’s third largest city, by a group of six businessmen, some of which then had prominent positions in Pinochet’s government and later became relevant figures in one of Chile’s right wing political parties. Legal documentation shows that the six original founders remain in the ownership and control of the university, two of which are also chief executives of a large business conglomerate, Grupo Penta, with interests in banking, insurance, real estate and HMOs. In 1999, by purchasing and taking over the campus of a failing university, it opened a branch campus in the upper class suburbs of the capital city of Santiago. With close to 6,000 students in its two campuses, and over 200 students in its MBA programs, UDD advertising caters the private schooled, upper classes with an emphasis on the development of entrepreneurial skills in all of its study programs.

Another form of control in proprietary universities is represented by the two Chilean universities owned by Laureate Education, Inc., formerly Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc., a United States based for-profit, publicly traded company with universities and schools also in the United States, Switzerland, Spain, France, and Mexico. One of Sylvan’s Chilean universities, Universidad de las Américas, UDLA, is the country’s largest private, with close to 16,000 students in four campuses in Santiago and one in the Southern city of Concepción. Its advertising campaign stresses the purpose of serving the working adult population, but enrollment statistics show that only one-third of its students are enrolled in evening programs. The fact that half of UDLA’s students in 2003 were freshmen reflects its massive growth in the years since its acquisition by Sylvan in 2000, aided by an open admissions policy which requires nothing else than a secondary diploma. This is a teaching only institution where programs are run with no full-time faculty other than a slim administrative staff, and where rapid growth in its middle-class campus locations has led to low qualifications requirements to join the teaching staff. Focus groups of freshmen classes reported to me in other universities indicate that UDLA is viewed as a “supermarket” university.

In the last ten years, six proprietary universities have been put out of business by financial collapse, merger, acquisition, or a combination thereof. Several others have seen new owners take charge.[xviii] This, and the reciprocal denunciations of “other” private institutions one hears at private universities, suggest that economic gain is not alien to the motives of the owners of at least some of these institutions. But the single-minded pursuit of profits often decried by the critics of private higher education is a simplistic and misleading characterization of the sector as a whole. For sure, some universities are said to be run just like large business corporations, and to have generated enormous gains for their owners when they have sold them, or through their real estate companies and other for-profit firms providing services to the university. Indeed, according to officials in independent universities, whether a university owns its buildings or rents it from other companies is a close proxy to profit-seeking motive. But many others are more like small family-run concerns, or part of ideological causes, and not a few are inspired mostly by bona-fide educational goals, while most would recognize in a mix of motivations their true impetus.

Independent universities

Universidad Diego Portales, UDP, was established in 1982, as one of the first three private universities created after the 1981 reform, by seven individuals, six of which took positions on the Board and the remaining one became the rector of the newly formed university. However, instead of keeping membership in the university to themselves the founders invited others to join in. By 1983 the university already had 32 shareholders. Neither the founding members, nor the others who joined in subsequently, conceived of the university as their property. There were no real estate firms associated with the university, and it owned all of its infrastructure. To make this feature clearer and irreversible, the founding members of the university and their associates decided in 2002 to turn the university into a foundation, endowed with the university’s assets. Shareholders relinquished their nominal interests in the university and a self-perpetuating Board was conformed to govern the institution, instead of a shareholder’s appointed Board. A new amendment, passed in 2003, seeking to brin