Higher education for socialism in Venezuela: massification, development and transformation

This chapter examines the reform of higher education in Venezuela, in the context of the country’s explicit program of national transformation and construction of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’. Venezuela’s break from orthodox neoliberal policy frameworks began with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, accelerated following his re-election in 2006 under the banner of building ‘Bolivarian socialism’. Some of the most striking reforms have been the mass expansion in enrolments via new public universities, open-access pathways to enrolment and an attempt to reconceptualise university education, its nature, content and delivery. Drawing on policy documents and data, as well as 15 months of fieldwork in Caracas over 2010–2011 by the author, this chapter identifies and elaborates some of the key characteristics of the transformation of higher education being advanced in the country and their links to the wider process of building a viable model of socialism for this century