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Executive Vice President of CRUCH, Aldo Valle, explains the negative effects that the Constitutional Court ruling on financing higher education brings.
"The decision of the Constitutional Court has very serious effects on the higher education system and specifically on financing and from there, on the functions of a university system," said Aldo Valle, Executive Vice President of CRUCH and rector of the University of Valparaíso , after hearing the ruling of the Constitutional Court (TC) that agreed to declare the unconstitutionality of article 63 of the project, and of transitory article 18, referring to the legal status of university controllers.
In the opinion of the CRUCH authority, very serious effects are produced with the recent ruling of the TC, by leaving article 63 without effect, “the profit prohibition is deprived of effectiveness, since the Higher Education Reform project considers a policy of gratuity, but it established that higher education institutions had access to it, with the assumption that they would not have profit-making entities among their members, nor among their controllers, the most serious thing is that now, gratuity remains open for institutions controlled by profit-making entities, ”Aldo Valle said.
For this reason, the CRUCH warns that now, gratuity could be open to institutions that formally and legally declare themselves as non-profit institutions and therefore can access the gratuity, but could be effectively controlled by profit-making entities, “With the ruling of the TC here and now, we have that higher education institutions that have for-profit controllers, such as those that belong to transnational education companies and that have publicly declared their profit-making purposes, can access public financing from the policy of gratuity, ”explained Valle.
Consequently, he added, “we are going to be left in a more precarious situation than the one that existed before the Reform, in which the legislation in force in Chile did not consider a policy of gratuity, but at the same time it was in force, at least formally, the norm that prohibited profit in higher education for all university institutions, ”said Valle.
Finally, the Executive Vice President of the Council of Rectors, announced that “once the Constitutional Court ruling is known, a reaction of rejection is generated in the student movement, explainable in my opinion, because what existed in 2010 or 2011 is restored, that is to say the situation that generated the student movement, then it is reasonable to understand that if it returned to what was in force in 2011, a social rejection will be generated regarding said situation, now legitimized by the decision of the Constitutional Court, "he said.