Is there room for interculturality? Indigenous youth in Peruvian private universities and the scholarship programme Beca 18

ABSTRACT

Applying an ethnographic approach, this study examines recently implemented scholarship programmes for Indigenous people in private higher education (HE) institutions in Peru. Interviews with students and staff, participant observations, and participatory activities reveal distrust of scholarship holders by government staff and programme regulators, who exercise various surveillance and control mechanisms. Staff at private universities hinder cultural diversity among students through segregation or integration strategies to deal with Indigenous students, thereby curtailing an intercultural approach. Indigenous students ask for more integration activities and intercultural dialogues as they claim a lack of adequate support programmes and real inclusion, which leads to higher dropout rates. This study contributes to the recovery of students’ voices and concerns by unveiling persistent inequalities in HE. The findings have implications on policy design that take for granted problematic assumptions riddled with colonial prejudices and privatisation ideologies within the field of HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous students
• higher education
• scholarship programmes
• interculturality
• Peru
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the participants of this study for their willingness to share their experiences and insights. I thank also Gabriela Ramos, Melissa Villegas and Francis Bravo for their work as research assistants, and to the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their useful comments. I am grateful also to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies for providing a stimulating environment to finish up the writing of this article as a resident Custer Visiting Scholar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

No.

Notes

1 In Peru, these categories refer to monetary poverty and are defined by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics as follows: ‘Poverty refers to people whose households have a per capita income lower than the cost of a minimum package of goods and services; extreme poverty refers to people whose households have a per capita income lower than the cost of a minimal level of nutrition (food costs).’

2 In Spanish this means Programa Nacional de Becas y Créditos Educativos.

3 The mandatory age for students to finish high school is 16 or 17 years.

4 In Spanish: Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana.

5 Beca 18 has the regular or ‘ordinary’ modality, for young people from poor or extreme poor households, and seven other modalities for vulnerable groups: Indigenous peoples (and more recently afro Peruvian people), victims of the armed conflict between 1980–2000, young people that did voluntary military service, from the coca production areas (VRAEM and Huallaga regions), and from the system of abandoned children’ shelters. The regular modality offers 4,500 scholarships, whilst 500 scholarships are directed to vulnerable populations.

6 Licencing process evaluated 8 basic conditions of quality: (1) Academic objectives, degrees and curriculum; (2) Academic offer aligned with planning tools; (3) Adequate infrastructure and equipment to fulfil its role; (4) Research lines; (5) Qualified teaching staff and no less than 25% full time teachers; (6) Basic complementary educational services; (7) Strategies for job insertion; (8) Transparency (making public basic information). 50 universities did not meet these conditions. 49 were private and had to close.

7 Tuition varies across universities, which the state pays 100%.

8 The GPA required is 13 or more (maximum is 20). This is slightly lower than the required GPA for regular Beca18 scholarship, which is 15 or more.

9 Requirements were changed between 2016 and 2018; here, I indicate the requirements valid at the time of the research and used with research participants.

10 Beca18 has eight modalities (see note 4 for details).

11 Intercultural Bilingual Education is a separate program from the Education programme that trains teachers for mainstream, Spanish speaking schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Pontifical Catholic University of Peru [grant number 447].