The objective of this article is to reflect on the role of higher education in our country. Chilean education, structured according to its context and history, has been structured according to a constant and unstoppable process of modernization of social institutions and the State. The idea is to understand how the economic structures converge on sociocultural dispositions, which in turn determine the agents of the educational process on cultural and symbolic levels. Consequently, we will try to reflect on a form of higher education that, beyond its regulatory and institutional structure, is affected by a social and economic structure to the extent of their dominance and the internalization of values from modernity, transformed in habitus, such as competitiveness, and individualistic requirements of a teleological and instrumental form, over the common good, vocation, social responsibility and professional ethics, to name a few.