The extents of university democratization in Latin America

The steady advance of the tertiary education enrollment which has been taking place during the last decades in Latin America is presented as a key democratization goal by many governments of the region. However, the different modalities and ranges of the policies developed allow the acknowledgement of the use of the different meanings of the term "democratization". Through the utilization of primary and secondary sources, and its application on some national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico), this paper tries to understand through the comparison the actual ranges and nuances of this process in each case of study. By doing a theoretical review of the democratization concept, we will be able to acknowledge its complexities, as well as its historical and polysemous nature. That will work as a general frame for the study of the situation in the region in terms of the enhancement of the social representation in the institutions. Beyond the significant advances carried out and the peculiarities of each case, the analysis of the empirical data shows that there's still a lot of work to do in order to reduce the uneven participation of the more disadvantaged social groups in Higher Education.