Breathe
By Nurit Martínez
The budget proposal for what will be the last year of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration has set off alarm bells in Mexico's university system, since it is now clear that the reform at that level, so out of focus, only shows red numbers; one of them, that every year 300,000 young people are left out of an educational option.
A report by the SEP states that before the start of this year's school year, 7.8 million young people in Mexico did not have a place in higher education.
In this technical proposal to operate the Federal Fund for Compulsory and Free Education, the government of the 4T recognizes that they are all those who were left out of the proposal for universal access to higher education institutions.
This document provides data that gives dimension to the lag and challenge. While at the beginning of the administration 780 thousand young people graduated from high school, in 2022 there were 1.5 million young people who left high school to seek a bachelor's or engineering degree.
But that continues to increase, the estimate is that by 2024 there will be 1.7 million. And in view of all the budgetary restrictions, the 36 public universities, plus the technological, polytechnic and intercultural universities continue to open spaces, but they are not enough.
The SEP estimates the annual deficit of educational options at 300 thousand. What do these young people do and where do they go? It is not clear, what is clear is that in the Palace there is great rejoicing because in the speech they stopped talking about the young people who neither study nor work (Ninis).
But not naming them only makes the problem invisible, it becomes a time bomb. It will be a time bomb for the next government, and for this reason, the teams of the two virtual candidates have already approached groups of experts in higher education issues to learn about the diagnosis, projections and design lines of action.
In the meantime, one of the presidential yearnings to put an end to the Nini is confronted with the reality of the diagnoses of the Ministry of Public Education itself. In spite of having these numbers in hand, there is little to do when the focus of the educational policy is only on basic education.
But if this is the promise of not having more university rejections, in the case of free education, the rectors of public universities have given an account of the challenges they face as a consequence of austerity and Franciscan poverty promoted from the National Palace.
Universality and free education were two of the principles promoted in the reform of the university system with the new General Law of Higher Education, in force since April 2021 and replacing the 1978 law.
The challenges more than two years after its publication are enormous, little progress has been made despite the fact that there are areas of the SEP that have committed not only political will but also effort, but no one else is listening to them.
Three officials have been in charge of the SEP (Esteban Moctezuma, Delfina Gómez and now Leticia Ramírez) but none of them made the agenda of the presidential commitments their own, much less the challenges of the university system.
The university policy needs to address old and structural problems such as the fact that a dozen of them are in a survival crisis for the payment of pensions and retirements, the expansion of the first decade of this century left without recognition and labor certainty many professors who are still waiting for the SEP to intervene with the Treasury as they did with teachers of the CNTE.
The list of these unobserved challenges is long: upgrading infrastructure, remodeling to ensure safety, risk protection from natural disasters, upgrading technology for education and free internet connection.
On the other hand, there is a demand for the renewal of academic, research and administrative staff. Training and teacher training, access to a greater number of scholarships, more resources for innovation and scientific development, promoting cross-cutting cooperation and mobility not only globally but also between systems and entities.
On the management side, insist on better administrative practices, transparency and accountability in the use of public resources.
But also issues that have put institutions in the spotlight, such as plagiarism of ideas, as in the case of Minister Yasmín Esquivel or the opposition coordinator for the Presidency of the Republic, Xóchitl Gálvez.
Likewise, gender violence, insecurity, the presence of drug dealers and other criminal groups around the institutions, the increasing consumption of drugs and alcohol by young people. This without forgetting the problems with student federations or associations that are targets of appetizing interests in succession processes in the institutions or in local electoral processes, as well as the interests of union groups in national and state environments.
Each of them could be detailed and deepened, what is certain is that expanding enrollment and that it does not imply expenses for families were the axes of the presidential proposal back in 2018.
It took three years to draft a law, one of the few that have achieved the consensus of all those involved. This is a task that must be recognized, but it was only the beginning.
This consensus in the subsystems and the signs of governance that, in particular, have been maintained by the rectors were of little use. There is mistreatment and disdain that is already expressed in a crisis due to the budget cuts to funds that were being contested to maintain the growth of enrollment, the quality of the system and the attention to structural problems.
Until last year, the cancellation of these funds amounted to 60 billion pesos in six years. The main universities in the country, the ones with the best treatment, had real cuts of 7 percent for the UNAM, 13 percent for the IPN and 14 percent for the UAM. The universities need someone to look at their problems, the next thing to happen will be a wave of young people with their amparo under their arms (as there are already precedents in a couple of state institutions) in search of making the constitutional precepts effective: universal access and free education.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
More than 150 opinions from 100 columnists await you for less than one book per month.
Comments ()