Conformación de grupos estratégicos en sectores de educación superior

Higher education markets are characterized by being highly competitive. The objective of this study is to analyze highly competitive higher education markets, such as those of Chile, using a strategic perspective, not just perspectives from the social sciences. This research analyzes the higher education market in Chile using the theory of strategic groups. In a first stage, exploratory factorial analysis is applied to obtain the strategic dimensions; later, cluster analysis is used to group the universities by their scores in the strategic dimensions. According to the results, Chilean universities compete based on the strategic dimensions of scope, reputation, infrastructure and advertising; 14 university groups are configured, and the relationship between strategic dimensions and performance are analyzed. Results show that the dimensions of scope and reputation correlate positively with an increase in enrollment and that the dimension reputation correlates positively with the price (fee) of the courses of study and ranking position. Conclusions are that consistency exists in the decisions adopted by Chilean universities, because they obtain performance results coherent with the strategies adopted and the resources deployed. Therefore, the makeup of the groups is stable to the extent that the universities, which are part of other groups, do not modify their strategic formulation.