Acreditación de los posgrados en Chile.

Abstract

In the 1990s, Chilean higher education institutions -principally the ones that are part of the Council of University Chancellors- started up a series of accreditation processes for post-graduate programs. These currently include undergraduate courses in view of the fact that evaluations assess the qualifications needed to ensure financing from the government and the private sector, because accreditation is an indicator of the fact that a given institution in particular possesses the conditions required to optimize resources. Simultaneously, accreditation has turned into a self-evaluation initiative that helps improve programs and subsequently permits their international projection. In short, the growing number of experimental processes underway and accreditation resolutions, coupled with the bill for the National Accreditation System currently being analyzed by the Chilean Congress predict that Chile will definitely have in place a system to validate the quality of higher education. In this framework, the article describes and quantifies the accreditation of postgraduate study programs in Chile, from their initial stage guided by CONICYT -the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research- up to the current phase under the Comisión Nacional de Acreditación de Posgrados.