ABSTRACT
Latin America continues to be one of the regions in the world with the highest levels of both poverty and inequality (Reimers, 1994; Bonal, 2004). While funding for public higher education has declined significantly in Latin American countries since the 1980s, universities were pressured to engage in processes of structural reform to accommodate global pressures and neoliberal economics (Torres and Schugurensky, 2002; Bonal, 2004). During the last half of the twentieth century, federal governments in Latin American countries began to create policies and programs to restructure higher education and foster social progress through knowledge construction. Programs for university change aimed to alter the organizational culture and structures of higher education institutions. The modernization of higher education in Mexico initiated during the late 1990s illustrates the ways in which traveling policies are adopted by national agencies and government to reorganize the political, economic, social, and educational landscape.
