TRENDS IN EDUCATION
Actors, discourses and actions in the context of the pandemic at the higher education level At the higher education level, the public and institutional policies implemented were guided by a fundamental principle: to sustain educational continuity. Identification was hence made of government actions aimed at retaining enrollment, facilitating connectivity and supporting the transition to emergency remote education, sanctioning or adapting current regulations in order to guarantee the legality of processes in virtual format, promoting alliances between secondary and higher levels, readjusting or suspending university admission tests, and, to a lesser extent, supporting teaching work, among others. On analyzing the measures for the continuity of academic programs, it can be observed that some of these were implemented from the perspective of the right to higher education, although occurring as they do in a region that has not succeeded in neutralizing the deep trends towards privatization and commercialization, actions were made advancing processes consolidating said trends. These processes have also generated movements in the opposite direction, such as the “zero enrollment” movement in Colombia. These movements dispute the idea of education as a commodity by questioning the idea of profit and the very scaffolding that sustains highly privatized higher education systems. The two central areas that demonstrate the processes of privatization and commercialization in the region in the context of COVID-19 are presented below. First is the group of measures aimed at responding to the financial crisis in higher education, particularly those that depend on charging fees for their operation. Second are the different actions that reposition technological agents in the field of higher education.
The financial rescuing of the private sector: discourse and action as ways of deepening the privatization of higher education For many countries in the region, the pandemic situation has meant the deepening of pre-existing economic difficulties and their effects on social structure, whose historical inequality has been compounded by the effects of the policies of neo-liberal and 48
