Serving Two Masters: First and Second-Generation Quality Assurance Reforms in Latin America

The present study is an interpretation of the trajectories of quality assurance policies in higher education in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Costa Rica. These trajectories are presented as cases of two instances of reform: one in the first generation and the other in the second generation, each stemming from different variants of the neoliberal economic-cultural program in Latin America that affected the role of the State and bureaucracies. The methodological strategy used in this article is a case study that includes a qualitative design for the production and analysis of data through a review of laws and relevant literature. Content analysis was used to analyze and interpret the data. The most significant results establish that both the first and the second-generation reforms use their own logics when promoting quality assurance in their respective countries in matters such as central state systems, in the case of the first generation, and public-private systems, in the case of the second. Likewise, the concentration of the bureaucratic functions of evaluation and accreditation are characteristic of the first generation, while decentralized bureaucracies are characteristic of the second.