Chile is introducing free higher education

> First off, one of the things that makes Chile great is that its education system is independant of the government.

Well that would depend on the definition of great. And for me, great is not zero class mobility

> It results in chileans who are markedly better at critical thinking than americans. (While there one of the things I did was work with high school and college students and of course got to know a lot of chileans.)

Could you tell me the names of those Schools? Because in my experience, as a Chilean, that happens not to be the case.

> Their schools are all about education and keeping the people sending their kids there happy-- by educating them.

The good, more expensive schools are > "all about education and keeping the people sending their kids there happy-- by educating them."

>> There is a real effect where the person paying the bills calls the shots. When government is paying the bills, turning out good citizens is the goal. This is why the football players are the heroes of most schools and the computer nerds are beat up. This is why schools are enacting absurd zero tolerance policies. This is why standardized tests and teachers tenure and unions are so bad.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that when I pay for my education in a Chilean School I call the shots and I can decide how the education of my Children should be? Well, if that's the case, even for the ones paying, that's only true in a minority of higher-end private schools in Chile.

> There really is something to the market incentive to provide a better experience at lower cost...

Yeah, we have a lot of choices when it comes to education, and among them, a lot of McDonald's equivalents have appeared. I'm sorry, but get real, yeah, there's an 'opportunity for Cheap High Quality', how is the target audience going to realize what's high-quality or not, if they are already uneducated? That's why in Chile, marketing is king for this crappy private universities, they lure the big mass of uneducated with the promise of a better future. In reality, that future, is just debt.

> The socialists are in power in chile right now but I don't think that will last long, and the reality is the Chilean constitution is pretty well protecting capitalism. Consequently the government runs a surplus does a great job of providing services and mostly stays out of peoples way... and Chile is the south american economic miracle as a result.

Dicator Augusto Pinochet and their team designed the current constitution of Chile, who has so many issues that are now collapsing our society. We definitely need improvements, a lot of the Chile that you see now, with a lot of capable professionals etc, is people who got formed pre-dictatorship.

tdlr, it seems that you only just know an epsilon of Chile. Next time you're here, try to see the big picture.

He's probably confusing what he said with students taking a gap year between high school and college.

Medicine@UBA a disaster? Are you talking seriously? Do you have arguments to say that?

But that too is a small minority. To be exact, in 2013, 9% of all first year students in tertiary education took a gap year. About 1/3rd of them traveled during that time, most of the rest had a job. And although the data doesn't explicitly say, it does seem like that includes those work for a few months between the end of the school year of high school (in May/June) and the start of the year at university, in September/October or in January, depending on the specifics. I'm not claiming they included everyone with a summer job, just that what is claimed to be a 'gap year' isn't really in many cases, but more a 'I have a few months time and I need to pay for my studies, let's make some money'. A far cry from the GP's suggestion that there is some formal structure to go soul searching or whatever.

Hello das2, sorry for the late reply. Yes, it was down to Fujimori.

It's true that Fujimori is in jail right now, but not for corruption. He's in jail for his overzealous approach to the antiterrorist campaigns that took place in the early 90s.

When the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist group that nearly managed to overthrow the state in the late 80s/early 90s) were at their peak, Fujimori came to power. Very shortly thereafter, the SL hijacked the Japanese embassy on a night when they had a big event on, kidnapping everyone from the Japanese ambassador to the directors of large Japanese corporations (Toyota, Sony, etc.).

Fujimori ordered a replica of the embassy to be built in the desert, and special forces trained there for weeks in preparation to storm the embassy. The operation was a great success, the kidnappers were killed, only one soldier died, none of the hostages died.

High on this amazing success, Fujimori ordered more campaigns against SL, and managed to pretty much eradicate them from the country. Two campaigns, however, did not go as planned. One at a university called La Cantuta, one in a poor district of Lima called Barrios Altos. Innocent people died in these campaigns, which had received his direct, personal go-ahead. That is what he went to trial for, and the reason he's in jail now.

Fujimori took over when the state itself was a failed state: hyperinflation of both the old Sol and the new Inti, had all but destroyed everyone's savings, political processes were sclerotic, there was enormous bureaucracy, no foreign investment, etc. Fujishock, as it has come to be called, was the process of undoing all this. Fujimori created the new Sol currency which has been a very stable currency ever since. Parliament was closed and replaced with one single congress and a super-simple process of election that elects both the percentage of parliamentary representatives and the president. Bureaucrats were sent home and the machinery of government simplified a great deal.

A lot of investment went into infrastructure, too: where it used to take more than a day for a farmer to take his produce to the nearest city, it can now take just 3 or 4 hours, which means they don't just go once a year but once every month, which puts them more in touch with the market and more responsive to price signals. Many things that would take forever to start (companies, brand registrations, etc.) can now be done online in a couple of days. The country has seen between 6 and 9% annual growth ever since the mid-90s, reducing poverty from over 50% to around 20% today.