Chávez I., C. (2017). Free market and higher education: the case of low-fee universities in Peru. In D. Cantini (Ed.), Rethinking private higher education: ethnographic perspectives (pp. 53-79). Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004291508_004

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the implications of practices and discourses surrounding the creation of a new institutional offer of higher education in low-fee private universities (LFU) in the city of Lima. This phenomenon is part of the process of the massification of higher education in the country and the expansion of the private market. The study focuses on how these institutional and non/institutional discourses and practices around the LFU are transforming universities themselves but also the social valuation of higher education. The chapter contains two levels of analysis: the institutional, related to public images and narratives that are part of the formal discourses of the university authorities and managers; and the students’ views, in particular their expectations of higher education, and the role of such expectations in social mobilisation. The hypothesis is that the new discourses and practices of the LFU have transformed education into a private good that includes a new perspective on the education system, seen as a market, and also on university students, treated as clients.