This article analyzes conflicts and dilemmas within Chilean Higher Education, built and massified as it was under neoliberal policies from 1980. In particular, the work focuses on the effects of reforms presented by the government of Michelle Bachelet in 2016, with the stated objective of removing the centrality of market mechanisms and guaranteeing access to Higher Education. These reforms sought respond to 2011's boiling over of social protests, then the most intense since Chile's return to democracy in 1990. Based on socio-historical analysis, with emphasis on the transformation of the state's role, Higher Education is seen to maintain its market inertia, entrenched by a state bureaucracy with close ties to ideological powers that control Higher Education. private. Under this arrangement, the crisis generated by the expansion of the market -as to the legitimacy of Higher Education and the coherence of its project- remains unresolved.