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MINERALS INDUSTRY EDUCATION AND TRAINING II

New careers

In 1981 the military regime of A. Pinochet issued the General Law of
Universities, which “liberalized” the educational system. With this new
legal body the dictatorship not only started the privatization of higher
education through the possibility of creating private universities without
state dependence, but it disrupted completely the network of existing public
universities, regionalizing them and dividing them into countless universities
with no relation to each other, in a deregulated higher education system.

Due to the greater demand for mining engineers, in the 2000 – 2009 period
new academic offerings appeared, such as the Universidad de Tarapacá,
Universidad de Aconcagua, Universidad Pedro de Valdivia and Inacap. Some
of these offered different majors and outlets adapted to the clients’ needs.

Cochilco is an “Agency of the State of Chile that advises the Government
in matters related to the production of copper and its by-products… It
also protects the State’s interests in its mining enterprises through the
supervision and evaluation of their management and investments, and it
advises the Ministries of Finance and Mining in the preparation and follow-
up of their budgets” (Cochilco, 2016). In 2010 Cochilco’s Evaluation and
Strategy Division, in its report called “Analysis of Demand – Offer of Project
Engineering in the Mining Industry” stated that in the 2010-2020 decade
mining investments for more than 50 billion US dollars would be expected,
a figure that in the following year was updated to 90 billion US dollars.
Furthermore, Cochilco presented “Engineering Needs for the next 10 years”
at the Institute of Mining Engineers of Chile (Instituto de Ingenieros de
Minas de Chile), stressing the existence of a consensus in the mining sector
projecting a deficit of human resources for the coming years, when the
supply should grow 40% per year over the 2011-2015 period (Instituto de
Ingenieros de Minas de Chile, 2010). In the face of this panorama, from 2011
there was a large increase of the academic offerings of several universities,
both state and privately owned, and also of professional institutes (PI). This
is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows an explosive increase in the offerings
starting in 2011, the year in which the U. del Mar, U. Católica del Norte,
and U. Adolfo Ibáñez presented their offerings; in 2012 it was the U. La

Mineral Processing Education
102 Section 3
around with World