Postgraduate Accreditation 1990-2020. Comparison of the Higher Education-Postgraduate System of Argentina and Chile

Abstract

The expansion of graduate programs, influenced in a first phase by the increase in the coverage of secondary education since the second half of the twentieth century, and of higher education since the 1980s, in a context of liberalization of the university system in Argentina and Chile, contributed to a “deregulated” growth in the offer of fourth level programs.
This review briefly describes the development of graduate programs in Argentina and Chile since the return to democracy and the reforms to the respective higher education systems, passing by the concern for quality, the attempts of proto-agencies responsible for the evaluation and accreditation of programs and institutions, to the main attributes of the graduate programs accreditation process in both systems.
The development of the “postgraduate”, abstracting from the size of both systems, shows a similar trajectory, an external agent promoting policies, a growing offer of programs and the compulsory accreditation of universal postgraduate programs in Argentina, to which Chile would begin to converge with the full implementation of its Law on Higher Education published in 20