On this week’s episode of the World of Higher Education Podcast, Javier Botero joins us to discuss Colombian higher education. These days he’s a lead consultant at the World Bank, but formerly he was the Vice Minister of Higher Education in Colombia, and he’s here with us today to provide an overview of recent policy developments in the nation.

Colombia’s higher education system is complex. In addition to a large number of universities, it also has two other sectors, one of which resembles North American community colleges and the other, which resembles European Universities of Applied Sciences, or as we sometimes say in Canada, polytechnics. Layered on top of this is the fact that the system contains large numbers of both public and private universities, which coexist with one another. And if you’ve ever been walking along Bogota in the main streets, you’ll see that they sometimes exist almost side by side. So, it’s a challenging system to manage.

Colombia is a country with enormous potential and the country’s success over the last 20 years in healing its political and economic divisions has led to have one of the highest growth rates anywhere in the Western Hemisphere since the turn of the century. That prosperity has also benefit higher education in the country with enrollments more than doubling over that period. How the country managed that feat is one of the major topics of my discussion with Javier.

Last year, Colombia elected new president, Gustavo Petro, who politically is much further to the left than any previous head of state. Petro won with the enthusiastic support of the country’s student movement, and he made some major promises to them that might be hard to keep, in particular, replacing student loans with grants and making public universities tuition free. The problem of course, is that these things cost money, and with a long list of priority social investments, it’s not clear that the president and his team will actually be able to make this happen. Again, Javier walks us through the details of Petro’s Dilemma and offers some thoughts about how the country’s tertiary system will evolve over the next decade or so.

If that weren’t enough. We’ve got ministerial intrigue. We’ve got refugee crises. It’s a fascinating conversation and you can listen to all of it here.

---

Alex Usher (AU): Hi Javier. Welcome to the show. I want to start off by talking about private higher education in Colombia. Now, like much of Latin America, Colombia has a very extensive, thriving private sector in higher education. I was in Bogota just before Covid, and I realized as I was walking along, I could get to three or four universities within 30 seconds. Just by standing in the road, I could probably hit them all with a stone if I were going to throw one. It’s not just a demand absorbing private sector system, right? It’s not just the sort of the cheap ones that are trying to pick up the students with fewer qualifications. Some of the country’s most prestigious institutions such as Universidad de Los Andes are in the private sector. What can you tell us about the country’s private university system?

Javier Botero (JB): I would say that is similar to what happens in the public sector. You find very good universities. First of all, higher education institutions have to be a non-profit. So, there cannot be this type of profit institutions. There are many that were created by groups of professionals or societies that really want to offer and give the opportunity to more people in higher education and there are very good ones. But there are also some that these guys somehow, they are making profit and they are there for business. The population of students is about 50/50. Little bit more on the public side because of the large public institution for technical and vocational education, which offers all also technical and technological degrees. But other than that, it’s about 50/50, and you can find as good and as bad as in the public sector.

AU: With this many private universities, regulation and quality assurance must be a pretty big part of the higher education ministry’s job. How does the country approach regulation? Is there something special about the way that you’ve evolved a system of quality assurance?

JB: I think there is. When I was a vice minister, we actually set up the quality assurance system in the country. It has let’s say a two step system. We have a licensing that is not a permanent licensing, but every program has to go every five to seven years through quality assurance process called qualification certification. Then you have the high-quality accreditation, which in principle is for higher quality and excellence of programs and institutions. So yes, there is and actually that is one of the topics that is now in the sector, in the government, very permanently, because especially the process of the qualification certification or the licensing is very strict and is time consuming for the higher education institutions.

AU: And that would be similar to an accreditation process, say in the United States, that kind of all full institution examination of processes?

JB: Yes. But of course, as I said, we have the two levels: the certification and then the high-quality accreditation. The government has tried very hard to articulate them both. So, for example, if you get an institutional accreditation, you don’t have to go through the registry to the licensing process. So, they are both heavy processes, but at least they have tried to be articulated, so it’s not so cumbersome to higher education institutions, but it is. Higher education institutions have to have a quality assurance unit that has to be in front of that because it’s time and resource consuming.

AU: One of the things not many people know about Colombia is that it is the home of the world’s oldest student aid agency. That’s ICETEX, which started out as a student loan fund in the early 1950s, which was more than a decade before student loan programs became a thing in United States or Canada or anywhere else. Why was Colombia so early off the mark on this and what’s been the effect of having a more developed loan program than other countries in the region?

JB: I think that it was really a very good idea innovation. The name comes from a student loan for studying abroad. So, really, they started offering loans to study in the US, in Europe or whatever. And then it became apparent that the country didn’t need only that, but also, because the public sector was low, and I might say something about it in a little bit, that the country needed also a private sector or private institutions, but then of course the tuition has to be full tuition to most students. That was a way to actually to help or support the private sector by financing the students. The impact is really tremendous. ICETEX has financed several million students. Nowadays it has more than 400,000 loans. So, it’s really been a very helpful instrument tool for increasing the enrollment rates.

AU: Now recently enrollment rates have shot up enormously. I think I saw that between in the decade, between about 2005 and 2015, the rise of enrollments was about 80%. So, nearly doubling in 10 years. That’s pretty extraordinary for a country that already had a pretty a pretty good access rate. How did the country manage that? What were the policy tools that were used to accommodate that growth?

JB: I fully agree and I must say that was done together with the trying to improve quality, which is even harder. It was done in two ways. One, was through the funding of public universities it was an initiative in early 2004. Most of the funding of public institutions is base funding, the government just gives the money and that’s it. The law actually says that the next year has to be at least equal to the funding of the previous year. So, it’s very interesting and difficult. But then, in the Development Plan Law in 2003, we put some funding that depended on indicators and send the message “Okay, if you want more funding, then you have to have more students among other things.” And that had a big impact, in the sense that the public university or the public institution sector really realized, that they amended the law, and they had to do it. There was a big pressure from government and society for the public universities to respond to this. The other side is really is a tax. At that time in 2002, there was the first transformation of the ICETEX. With resources from the World Bank, we actually increased the number of loans that were given to students. So, both in the public and private sector, there were ways to put more pressure on universities and higher education institutions to have more students.

AU: Another big change in the policy environment over the past few years is that Colombia is hosts to an awful lot of refugees coming from neighboring Venezuela. I imagine that’s led to a surge in applications to universities by non-citizens and some challenges with respect to recognition of foreign credentials. What have been the major impacts on the higher education system of the refugee crisis?

JB: It hasn’t been as much as one would have expected. The reason is that many of the refugees don’t have the high school degree or if they do, then they didn’t bring it with them, they don’t have the proofs. It’s been a very difficult process for the recognition of degrees, even high school, but also, higher education degrees. In Colombia, the government has been very careful to get this recognition of degrees to be somehow rigorous. It has, of course, its pros and cons, but the pressure from the from the migrants, hasn’t been that much as one would have expected with the number of immigrants.

AU: I want to now get to recent politics. Colombia has gone through a pretty big political shift lately. Since independence, which is I guess over 200 years ago, the country is alternative between conservative and liberal governments but in June of last year, the country elected Gustavo Petro, the representative of Pacto Historico por Colombia, a coalition of left and environmentalist movements. What was in Petro’s Manifesto for higher education? What are his priorities for change?

JB: Yeah, it is totally true. It’s a big change and one of the reasons why actually Petro was elected was the student movement. The students, they go to streets and they really make society know that things are not going well. This movement had as one of its flags as for example the free higher education, the underfunding of the public sector, and precisely Petro got that, and said, “okay, we will, improve the higher education and we will give more money to public institutions and will actually accelerate the gratitudad, the free tuition, for higher education in public institutions.”

AU: Right now, it’s not free in public institutions. What would be the tuition?

JB: It really depends. It depends on the university. Tuition is really on the autonomy of the university to actually say how much they have to pay. It depends, in some universities, if you see, for example at Universidad de Antioquia, one of the best universities in Colombia, the tuition is almost nothing for everyone. But in the national university, the tuition depends on the family income of the students. So, you see some students that pay very little, but you see some students that pay as much as almost as much as the Los Andes maybe not as much, but not that far from the private sector.

AU: So, Gustavo has said things and as I understand, which mostly about, less tuition, more funding, and I believe getting rid of either, either student debt or student loans. I’m not sure, but certainly ICETEX. Some of the Twitter feeds I follow from Colombia are not very complimentary about ICETEX in terms of people want grants, not loans and those kinds of things. Does he have money for all of this? He has promised a lot, but is there an ability to deliver?

JB: Yeah, unfortunately not. And an interesting thing that when sees on this, is the case of ICETEX. The person who was designated as the president of ICETEX who is designated by the president he is actually, he was very open on his opposition ICETEX and, he had this discourse “the ICETEX, let’s kill ICETEX and death to ICETEX”. And of course, when he got in office, he realized, “okay, this is not the case. This is really an impressive tool and instrument for higher education.” It has had a lot of good impact. If one sees the national development plan, in Colombia, we have these national development plans where every government prepares like a roadmap, for the four years in this law and ha, almost half of the articles of the law on education are on ICETEX. The goal is to increase enrollment by more than 500,000 students, which is a big number. It’s an increase of 20%. Nowadays. There are 2,500,000 students maybe a little bit more, a little bit less. Public universities or public institution said, “okay we cannot.” I think they committed to only something like 60 or 65,000 new students. The only way to get close to the target, to the goal is with the private sector. And for that you need the student loans.

AU: Gustavo Petro’s first minister of education was Alejandro Garviria Uribe, a former rector of Universidad de Los Andes, as well as a former health minister in the government of hon of Juan Manuel Santos. But he resigned a little over two months ago after a tenure of just over six months. Why? Was that a specific policy dispute or was there something larger? A non-meeting of minds between the minister and the president?

JB: I think a little bit of both. Let’s say it’s more the first, but not on education. Garviria was Minister of Health for almost six years during Santos. And the government has been trying to support to get through parliament a reform of the health system. I’m not a health expert, so I’m not going to comment on that, but Alejandro Garviria was opposed to that reform from the beginning, and he was open on that.

AU: So, the higher education minister resigned on a matter of policy principle, but the policy was in health.

JB: In health. Yeah.

AU: Now the new Minister of Education is Aurora Vergara Figueroa, she’s a professor, if I’m not mistaken, and she’s not been in politics long. How does her appointment change the political dynamic in the sector? Is she going to be able to soothe the worries of students who thought that they were getting something from Petro that maybe they’re not going to get now?

JB: What I would say is that we all hope that Aurora does very well. She’s really a very special person, in many ways. She comes from a very poor background and she actually got her PhD and she’s worked in research and all of that. It is true that she doesn’t have much experience in politics, but she’s a smart person and we all hope that she does well, but I would say that the main issue is what you just said, it would be very hard to respond to all the expectations that the students and the society had have with the government in general, but in high education in particular, and especially because, the Petro and, and the whole government has put higher education in a very important position in the education sector and even in the whole policy agenda. The amount of money and resources needed to do all what they want to do and most of it is really good and needed but it’s just too much and there is no money for that. And then if you add to that his promises in health and infrastructure and the pensions and everything else. It will be very difficult to get the money with the resources to do all of that.

AU: Regardless of where the Gustavo governments parties lie, I’m curious from your perspective, what are the most important challenges facing higher education in Colombia right now? Is it affordability or expansion or improving the research base? Where do you think the policy emphasis should be in the coming years?

JB: Economists usually try to put a solution of a big problem on a single thing and I don’t think this works in education. We have several issues. One, of course, is to increase the access, especially the gaps between regions and social sectors in the population. That’s a big issue still in higher education. It’s a little bit of the elite, especially higher education in good institutions. As we said at the beginning, there are big differences both in the public and the private sector, in quality, and of course also in relevance. That brings me to the second point: the quality and relevance of the programs offered. We have in Colombia very interesting tools to actually follow how do graduates do. Do they get a job? Is there job in the area that they actually got the degree? How much are they paid? How long it takes them to get the jobs. And what one sees is that there is a mismatch, a very large mismatch between what the industry and society is looking for or needing and what the university is actually providing.  So, in quality and relevance. Then, of course, this brings to the regional part. Most of the institutions are in the capitals and so it’s very difficult for a student that gets his high school degree in a small town in a rural area to go to university. So, I think that those are the main issues. And of course, it all goes through funding, through money, the sector needs more money and needs more public state funding in any case.

AU: Finally, how optimistic are you for the sector? You’ve outlined a lot of challenges, Colombia’s a country with a lot of potential in politics and economics and higher education. If we come back to Colombia in 10 or 20 years is the system going to be in better shape?

JB: I would say so. In the last 20 years really, the system has gotten a lot of improvement. And what one would expect is that that would continue, there is no reason for not doing that, especially because of this, public, private mixture in the sector. So, I’m relatively optimistic. I think Colombia has big issues, and externalities that affect and impact the higher education sector then have to be solved. I think that having a government from the left is very good for the country. We have really a lot of issues with equity. Inequity within a region and inequities between regions and there has to be policies to actually solve that. So, one would expect even though one must say that even though previous governments even from the right also tried to do that, at least that’s one of the main flags of this current government from the left that could help. But there is a very dynamic sector in higher education. When some resources are given, what it’s getting out of that is really amazing. So, I’m optimistic and I would say that in 20 years from now the system will be much better with more social equity and having more impact on the society and the private sector in general.

AU: And that’s all the time we have for today. Javier Botero, thank you so much for being with us.

JB: Thank you very much for having me.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank this show’s excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, the listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please do get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Please join us next week!

*This transcript has been auto-generated with limited editorial review; suggested edits can be made to podcast@higheredstrategy.com.