A Higher Education Institutional Reform Shaken by Political Turmoil – The Case of Peru

Improved access to higher education should lead to stronger cultural integration, social mobility and higher equality ultimately paving the path for higher levels of workers’ engagement in the working place and, overall, for a wider democracy. Peru has been facing a drastic educational institutional reform process during the last decades. Until 1995, the Peruvian university system was characterized by the lack of quality standards for the provision of university services to students, concentration of universities in the capital and the possibility to create or abolish some of them through legal mandate. In 1996, the institutional framework was modified, allowing private universities to be created and function as for-profit companies by any natural or legal person. Since then, private universities, both profit and non-profit, hugely increased their participation in the education market, arriving to about two third of the universities present in Peru. With the goal of improving the higher education system Ley Universitaria 30220 was approved in 2014 and a new institution, the National Superintendence of Higher University Education-SUNEDU, was created to carry out a deep licensing process in order to regulate and organize the Peruvian university system. From 2016 until 2021 a very strong education reform was carried out but this process was shaken by an extremely dangerous obstacle, a new political turmoil