The growth of private education in Argentina: evidence and explanations

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Argentine education system went through a clear process of privatisation expressed in the increasing enrolment and state funding of the private sector. Especially in the 1990s, when the country implemented neoliberal economic policies, the academic literature had found in neoliberalism (in ideology, public policy and the enactment of certain laws) an explanation for this process of privatisation. Since the 2000s, and after a severe economic crisis, successive governments have rejected the neoliberal policies and have established a set of regulations and public policies with the explicit purpose of changing the previous policy trend. This article shows that after one decade of this new policy opposed to neoliberalism, the evidence suggests that privatisation of education has not only not been reversed but even expanded in a significant manner, reaching striking rates of increase, both in private enrolment and in state funding. Finally, the evidence presented shows that neither neoliberal nor post-neoliberal policies seem to determine the privatisation of education for the Argentine case. The article concludes with some remarks so as to design an explanatory model to account for the dynamics of the education system.