Outside the Mainstream Rhetoric

Abstract

During the turbulent decade of the 1990s, the authorities of one of the most prestigious universities in Colombia, the Catholic U. Javeriana, chose not to increase tuition fees to the level other private universities did. This initiative was determined and implicit, and over time the very exclusive elitist social status that the university had had until that time was overlapped with a profile of a more accessible university that symbolizes its social role in maintaining equity through the promotion of social mobility. Many students at the U. Javeriana, an alumni interviewee commented, felt uncomfortable with the noticeable change in the profile of students that entered the university. They claimed that this supposedly perceived loss of prestige would promote the decay of the university’s reputation for excellence, and some even decided to leave for other more prestigious institutions. Even nowadays, the U. Javeriana maintains a lower degree of fees that allows for openness in an otherwise very stratified higher education system; the average tuition fee at the U. Javeriana in 2007 was 58 percent of the U. de los Andes (Observatorio de la Universidad Colombiana, 2012).