SANTIAGO, Chile—During one of the massive student protests that have rocked Chile in recent months, 23-year-old activist Camila Vallejo was hit squarely in the face with spray from a water cannon.
Although drenched and disheveled, she stayed right on message, lambasting a higher-education system she says is too intent on profit rather than learning.
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Associated Press
Surrounded by media members, student leader Camila Vallejo, center, uses the remains of tear gas canisters to depict a peace sign on the floor during a demonstration outside the government palace in Santiago.
"Education isn't a business," she said, "but a basic right."
Ms. Vallejo, a geography major who is a member of the Chilean Communist Party, is the unlikely leader of the biggest demonstrations to hit Chile since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990.
The students are demanding the government spend more to subsidize hefty college-tuition costs and ease the debt burden of graduates struggling to pay student loans. The protesters also want changes in a primary- and secondary-education voucher system, which they say favors youths from wealthier families. Polls show that the protests have won broad sympathy among older Chileans frustrated by income inequalities in a country long seen as a model of economic stability in Latin America.
The students argue that Chile's educational system reinforces disparities in a country where the richest 20% of households earn half of national income, while the poorest 20% earn just 5%.
"Trickle down hasn't worked," Ms. Vallejo said in a phone interview.
Unable to mollify the students since the protests started in May, billionaire President Sebastian Piñera has seen his approval rating wither to 26%, according to conservative think tank CEP. It is the lowest level any president has obtained since the return to democracy. Mr. Piñera has invited Ms. Vallejo and other student leaders to a personal meeting Saturday, to try to once and for all iron out the differences.
"Chile is a profoundly unequal country," said Patricio Navia, a Chilean political scientist at New York University, who voted for Mr. Piñera. "The opportunities people have depend on what position their parents have in society. The student movement seeks to level the playing field and expand the opportunities."
Ms. Vallejo, known for her nose ring and her telenovela-star good looks, grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb to parents who were active in the Communist Party. Leading protests as head of the student federation at the massive University of Chile, she now has more than 210,000 Twitter followers. A guitar-playing admirer uploaded a serenade he had written to her. The demonstrations have attracted tens of thousands of protesters, at times leading to rock-throwing battles with police, which paralyzed Santiago.
Ms. Vallejo also has virulent enemies. A Facebook page sprung up announcing an event "to kill Camila Vallejo." Even some analysts who agree with her critiques of the system have differences with the remedies she proposes.
Prior to the 1973 coup by Mr. Pinochet, Chile's two main public universities, as well as private religious schools, were heavily subsidized by the government. Mr. Pinochet reduced public funding and spurred the creation of private universities and technical schools.
Mr. Pinochet also transferred public primary and secondary schools from federal to municipal hands and offered parents vouchers which they could use at private schools. The theory was that competition would compel schools to improve quality.
The changes have left a mixed legacy. Chilean 15-year-olds rated highest among their Latin American peers in 2009 academic tests administered by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, though they scored below the average of the wealthier countries comprising the OECD.
Chile made marked advances in boosting reading-comprehension skills over the past decade, the OECD found. Meanwhile, at the college level, enrollments are way up, and seven out of 10 university students are the first in their family to go to college.
But at the primary and secondary level, the system prompted a flight by the middle class out of public schools, whose enrollment fell to 43% of the student population in 2008 from 63% in 1986, according to the OECD. Chilean students coming from public schools have substantially lower test scores than those who attend private schools and are often unable to pass rigorous entrance exams at prestigious public universities, the OECD noted. Poorer students are often forced to attend private universities, which can be more expensive and of uneven quality.
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Reuters
Demonstrators attacked a police vehicle at a Santiago rally last month.
One study showed that Chilean tuition costs had increased about 60% in real terms from 1997 to 2009. To pay off student loans, some graduates have to set aside as much as 18% of their salaries over 15 years, one of the highest payback rates in the world, the World Bank said.
Still, Gregory Elacqua, director of the Public Policy Institute at Diego Portales University in Santiago, said Chilean authorities have already instituted policies to help poorer students in recent years, and what is needed are further efforts in that direction targeted at areas such as student debt. Many experts also differ with the protesters' focus on prioritizing the higher-education system. They say Chile could get more bang for its education buck directing spending on preschool, elementary and secondary education.
The government has offered to reduce interest rates on student loans, create an education regulator, increase the education budget by $4 billion over the next four years and grant more scholarships for teacher training. Mr. Piñera also chastened the demonstrators that "nothing is free in this life."
Ms. Vallejo says the government's offer is inadequate. She says the younger generation is different from stoical older Chileans who instinctively held their tongues about their grievances because of harsh memories of Mr. Pinochet's rule.
"We don't have the fear our parents did because we never lived in the dictatorship," she said.
Write to Matt Moffett at matthew.moffett@wsj.com and Carolina Pica at carolina.pica@dowjones.com
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