Los procesos de acreditación en instituciones de formación superior: Chile, España y otros países de Latinoamérica

The educational system of any country urgently needs to establish evaluation criteria on the implementation, operation and results of the system itself as a whole and on each of its levels, taking into account the structure, development and impact that its application could produce in the educational-social field. It is well known that this interest is widely shared in all countries with demanding, well-structured and developed educational systems, becoming one of the priorities of the Chilean educational administration, currently immersed in a process of analysis regarding the application of the chosen model, sometimes questioned, which will possibly conclude with making changes within the model itself, or at least, in the development of its application. For this reason, we maintain that, from the different sectors involved in this process, it is necessary to make contributions in order to enrich the debate with truthful information that allows us to place the issues discussed in their proper place, opening lines of opinion on what are understood as the strong points of this system and those that, in the opinion of the actors responsible for its application, would be convenient to review. This paper begins with a sample of the reality of the accreditation system for higher education institutions in Chile. To do this, we have taken the quality assurance model of this country as a reference, making it known in parallel with the aim of finding out how these are applied in Spain and some countries in our geographical environment, such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. We do this with the sole purpose of advancing one step further than what would be the mere knowledge of the system, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses, as we are also interested in learning about the impact of the accreditation system as seen by the key actors of higher education institutions.