Mexican universities are low quality and will continue this way due to lack of budget

The general secretary of the workers union of the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Agustin Rodriguez Fuentes, recognized that in general terms, the Mexican public universities are low quality, and only two of every three are competitive, but this will continue due to the lack of budget. 

The key is to accomplish what UNESCO recommends worldwide, to assign four percent of the GDP into a budget aiming science and education. In the present, only 0.48 percent goes to this budget, which doesn’t even get to the 1 percent of the national GDP.


He highlighted some universities that serve under disastrous conditions due to the lack of resources, with most of them located in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacan. But in general terms, most of the country’s universities are not close to representing something different, having no correlation with the productive sector.
 
Nevertheless, he rejected that these institutions of higher education are only producing unemployed graduates. “The universities are producing what they can, from what they are allow to do, since there is not a public law for the development of the internal market, clear and precise in the whole country, and this will restrict the internal market.”
 
The key for this is to have a narrow relationship between the educative and the productive system, because unfortunately most of the government have other priorities.
 
Another thing that has to stop being a priority, is the economic development for external business, and give priorities or streghten the internal development, which would make this situation different. “The internal market has a lot to give, our country has a lot of potential but everything goes outside of Mexico.”
 
He denied that UNAM had lost leadership in the country due to the development of private universities such as Puebla’s UDLA or the Technologic Institute of Monterrey (TEC), because the first one is still the number one university in Latin America.
 
Unions from universities around the country will meet to visit the House of Representatives to negotiate higher resources for this educational level, said Rodriguez Fuentes.
 
He said that unfortunately under the 2015 budget proposal, that was already delivered to the legislative power, there are not improvements for higher education, saying that what the president Enrique Peña Nieto said about supporting universities, was only part of his speech.