Perceptions about the university student profile in the context of mass higher education: Approaches from Chile

© 2018 Interciencia Association. All Rights Reserved. The purpose of this paper is to show a frst view regarding the perception that the diverse members of the academic community have about the characteristics of the profle of students that Chilean universities receive. For this purpose, we worked with a private university and a state university, both located in a region in the south of the country. The methodological approach used corresponds to the Grounded Theory. The technique for collecting the information was the semi-structured interview. The information collected was transcribed and processed in the NVivo 12 program, where coding stages were followed, moving from open to axial coding until an approximation of the selective coding was achieved. The processes described were linked at all times. The results show that the members of the academic communities recognize the confguration of a new profle of students as a result of the changes in the environment, without observing in this frst stage great differences in the characteristics at both institutions.