Mexico is one of Latin America’s richest nations, but its population is among the region’s least educated.
Mexico’s gross college enrollment rate, according to Unesco statistics, is just 28 percent, compared with 73 percent in Argentina and 60 percent in Panama. Chile, which with Mexico has the region’s highest gross domestic product per capita—$14,000 a year, according to the World Bank—has 50-percent gross enrollment ratio. The average for Latin America is 37 percent. (The ratio, calculated by Unesco’s International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, represents the total number of college students, regardless of age, as a proportion of the number of traditional college-age students in the population.)
Given those disparities, the Mexican government in recent years has tried to expand access to higher education.
Since December 2006, when Felipe Calderón became president, the government has created 75 institutions of higher education and helped 33 existing ones to enroll more students, Rodolfo Tuirán, under secretary for higher education, announced in May. He said the administration planned to establish 20 more institutions and to increase enrollment opportunities at 44 universities by the time Mr. Calderón’s term ends, in December 2012.
“We believe that we all deserve opportunities, at quality institutions, with the adequate equipment and infrastructure,” said Mr. Tuirán, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. “Our responsibility is to make sure that the rate of expansion keeps up with the demand.”
He dismissed criticism that despite a growing demand for four-year degrees, most of the new institutions are two-year technical colleges. Such institutions account for just 60,000 of the 160,000 places created over the past year, he said.
If it meets its goals, the government will have expanded enrollment at public universities by 628,000 in just six years, according to a study by the National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions, which represents Mexico’s more than 130 public universities, as well as the top private ones.
Still, many academics say the government efforts aren’t good enough.
José Narro Robles, rector of the giant National Autonomous University of Mexico, says the government should work to achieve a 50-percent gross enrollment ratio by 2018 to meet the demand for college degrees in Mexico. That would require creating more than a million new places at universities over the next eight years.
“We need a greater effort and more resources,” he said in April, “but I have no doubt that this is a country that can do it.”
Mr. Narro also said the government should increase access for the poorest 10 percent of Mexicans, who account for just 4 percent of the country’s 2.8 million college students, according to the government’s own figures.
‘Extreme’ Issue of Quality
But the biggest problem facing Mexican institutions—and those in Latin America in general—is the poor quality of their academic programs, Mr. Narro says.
“There is a problem of inequality, yes, in the quantitative part, but I fear that the quality issue is still much more extreme,” he told 1,000 university presidents, from throughout Latin America and Spain, who gathered for a conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, in early June.
Like many countries in the region, Mexico has experienced a boom in low-quality private universities opening over the past two decades, as public universities have failed to keep up with demand for degrees. Many of the new private institutions lack the most basic facilities, and their offerings are confined to areas like accounting and business administration, fueling a glut in those degrees and rising unemployment among graduates.
Other academics have accused the government of inflating its progress in fostering access to higher education.
At the meeting in Guadalajara, President Calderón announced that his government would achieve a 30-percent enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds. He declared, “This puts us on the road to achieving a key objective and establishing a legacy for the new generations of Mexicans.”
Actually the 30-percent figure is based on the total number of students enrolled in institutions of higher education, according to Manuel Gil Antón, a sociology professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and others. About one-third of those students are older than the age group the president mentioned.
“It’s incredible that the government doesn’t understand the difference between gross and net enrollment rates,” Mr. Gil wrote in a June 21 opinion essay in El Universal, a newspaper in Mexico City. “If that’s the case, we’re in trouble.”
“And if they do know the difference,” he continued, “then they have no shame in celebrating what is simply not true.”
He argued that the high number of older students—roughly a million—reflects the failure of secondary schools to graduate students on time.
Educators have also expressed concern that the government is not creating new institutions of higher education in the capital, where existing public universities are bursting at the seams.
The National Autonomous University rejected a record 92 percent of applicants in February. But with 120,000 undergraduates and some 30,000 graduate students, Mr. Narro said, it “can’t give any more—it simply doesn’t have the capacity.”
