Policies of Inclusion in Higher Education: The Indigenous Students of the Beca 18 Program in Peruvian Private Universities

• In Event: 63.015 - Are Inclusive Education Policies at Risk? The Sociopolitical Changes in the Americas

Abstract

In recent years, various affirmative action policies and programs have been developed in the Americas. In Peru there are few experiences in this regard, but recently a massive program of scholarships for higher education (Beca 18) aimed at students living in poverty and extreme poverty, included indigenous young people from the Amazon, as one of the groups with the lowest access to higher education. The Beca 18 program assumes that, by covering the economic costs that families cannot afford, young people will have access to the benefits of studying at these universities and thus overcome exclusion. Higher education would then appear as a neutral space for the transmission of knowledge to which the previously (defined as) excluded population could, finally, have access. However, social research has shown that higher education is a complex space where certain knowledge and behaviors (and not others) circulate and are valued. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study on the experience of young indigenous scholarship holders in two private universities. It examines the scholarship program and its starting assumptions, as well as its demands and the logics that run through it. It investigates how the university responds to the presence of students from Amazonian and indigenous populations and how this new situation is perceived by the various educational actors (grantees, authorities, teachers). Finally, it warns against the risk of falling into the paradox that a measure that seeks to promote the inclusion of indigenous students in society, could at the same time be contributing to their exclusion from the benefits of private higher education that they were searching for.

Author

• Patricia Ames, Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Peru