A Decade of Chilean Graduate Program Accreditation: A Push for Internationalization and Issues of Multidisciplinarity

Chile implemented a new national quality assurance system for its higher education institutions in 2006 that included a set of policies and procedures for graduate education. Ten years after its implementation, this study looks at the perceived alignments and misalignments between the national accreditation goals and the graduate programs’ visions of improvement. By using the concept of loosely coupled systems, we studied eight science and technology master’s and doctoral programs at four research-oriented Chilean universities. In total, we conducted 26 interviews, visited all campus sites, and analyzed related documents. The results indicate that the national accreditation system improved academic quality across programs by strengthening the influence of university central administrations and raising faculty productivity standards. In particular, the accreditation meant a push for internationalization, which was welcomed at all institutional levels. However, after a decade, the accreditation system seems misaligned with programs’ new improvement efforts, such as the promotion of multidisciplinary work. To some extent, accreditation standards, based on strong disciplinary orientations, penalize a diverse student body and curricular innovation and do not consider the challenges of publishing multidisciplinary research.