Abstract
Higher education systems in Latin America are undergoing changes of great dimension. This is a transition between the old working models of higher education that characterized the systems for decades towards a new scenery of massive, differentiated, commercial, complex and global models. These are changes in the historical trends of higher education institutions in Latin America towards the development of new university paradigms in the framework of the knowledge society. This article is focused on the central nodes where those changes occur and on the tensions that those changes generate. The prefix ‘de’ is used in the article with the intention of opening up the academic debate on polemic concepts that contribute to the discussion on the future of higher education and public policy.