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Higher Education 43: 429–455, 2002. 429 © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The political economy of higher education in the era of neoliberal globalization: Latin America in comparative perspective CARLOS A. TORRES1 DANIEL SCHUGURENSKY2 1Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Latin American Center, UCLA, and Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil; 2 OISE-University of Toronto, Canada Abstract. During the last two decades, Latin American universities have experienced intense pressure to abandon the main principles established in the 1918 Córdoba Reform (i.e., autonomy and autarchy). While funding for public higher education has declined, they are pressured to relinquish a large portion of institutional autonomy in order to accommodate to market demands and to a new set of control strategies emanating from the state. We argue that current changes in Latin American higher education cannot be examined in isolation from larger political and economic changes in the region, which in turn are related to the dynamics of globalization. After the decline of socialist and welfare-state models, neoliberal regimes have become hegemonic in many parts of the world. In most countries, changes in financial arrangements, coupled with accountability mechanisms, have forced universities to reconsider their social missions, academic priorities and organizational struc- tures. Concerns about equity, accessibility, autonomy or the contribution of higher education to social transformation, which were prevalent during previous decades, have been overshad- owed by concerns about excellence, efficiency, expenditures and rates of return. The notion that higher education is primarily a citizen’s right and a social investment – which has been taken for granted for many decades – is being seriously chal