Welcome to the first podcast episode of 2023. As you read in Monday’s blog, the format of the podcast will be changing over the next few weeks. We are excited to bring you more stories of higher education from around the globe, including the countries highlighted the World Higher Education Review. While the formatting and branding will be changing, the quality insight our guests bring will not. This week we’re joined by Alma Maldonado-Maldonado of Mexico’s CINEVSTAV as we discuss the Mexican higher education landscape.

The full podcast can be found with a full transcript here, along with the past episodes of OPTSYD.  Thanks to our producers Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek.

Alex: If you were trying to explain the Mexican higher education system to a Canadian, what would you tell them?

Alma: We belong to the Latin American tradition. That means we have a national university that’s very important. We have a very centralized higher education system where the government still has a lot of power and control over it. We mostly are a public system [but] we have obviously a private subsystem of higher education, the number of students enrolled is less in comparison to the public one. We have an interesting diversity of institutions: technological, polytechnical, multicultural, state universities, pedagogical teaching schools, et cetera. Most of our programs are four years, in comparison to three-year programs in Europe. We have a very different system in terms of quality. We have very prestigious private institutions, and we have other type of “garage” universities [nb – many Latin American systems refer toa subset of private universities as “garage” universities because they are so small and under-resourced that they could be run out of someone’s garage], which has been a big issue in the country. One of the things that people should know about the Mexican system is that we are one of the countries with the largest number of universities in the world. We have more than 5,000 which is crazy. We are reaching about 4.5 million students. So, the number of students is not that large and not that impressive but we have a lot of institutions.

Alex: Tell us about the private institutions in Mexico. Is it like the United States where the private university sector has some elite institutions that can compete with the public national institutions?

Alma: The private sector is large and diverse. We have all kinds of private institutions. We have a very small sector of leaders in private institutions who do research and who they have a very high quality. But then we have another number of these institutions that basically receive tuition. We have these small universities that normally only report 40 students, 30 students, who knows, right? They disappear one year to the next one. It’s really a very chaotic sector.

One of the most important things that people who study higher education in Mexico worry about is that some of these institutions charge high tuition to the poorer families who believe their kids are getting some training or some education and at the end, this education is not relevant and won’t mean anything to the labor sector.

Alex: Your current President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador talked about making higher education universally accessible for people who finished secondary school when he came to office which would have meant adding about 1.4 million students between 2018 to 2024. How’s that going?

Alma: When López Obrador started his presidency, one of the main issues he proposed was free higher education. He also suggested “mandatory” higher education, which means mandatory for the state, not for the individuals. So, if I want to continue my higher education, the state must provide me the space to continue my education. Those are the two main points that he added into the constitution, they became law. But now we have a major contradiction. On one side, we have free higher education. On the other side, the public financing of higher education has collapsed. So, institutions are not able to really respond to that is new change in the constitution by offering free higher education because we have less and less money giving to the state universities, which actually are the most important subsystem of public higher education. We cannot accept more students because they don’t have enough money.

The other part of the story is during his campaign, he proposed this idea of creating a hundred new universities [nb – the “Benito Juarez” universities, after a 19^th century indigenous President of the country]. The whole plan has to do with creating these universities to open in communities where they don’t have higher education institutions and where there were restrictions for the population to access education at this level. Now, the problem is that they are not actually universities. First problem, the money provided for this for this project was not enough. Obviously if you don’t have money for the other universities, you don’t have money for this project. The other is that they are not universities but more like extension programs. Sometimes they have two professors, three professors, four students in some cases but the information is not really public. This has been another problem: transparency with this project. We don’t have enough data about how many students have enrolled, in what programs, anything. We basically are very blind on this. It’s unfortunate because the whole idea is good: the idea is to provide higher education to the sectors that traditionally have been excluded. Most people agree that this is important. The problem is how you are executing the project and the money that you are providing to it.

Alex Usher: My understanding is that the conflict that López Obrador has with the higher education community, it’s not just with the universities, but it’s also with the scientists. There’s been conflict with the National Scientific Agency as well. Could you tell us what that’s about?

Alma: Yeah, one of the things I would like to remark here is that we are dealing with this government, with this regime, and the main difference between him and other presidents is not that the other presidents were better, but the difference with this president is that he has been very critical openly emphasizing academics, scientists. For him, [higher education] is a luxury. We are talking about these privileges the academics have had historically and his criticisms has to do with that. [He says] we don’t care about the social problems, the political problems, nothing, we are apart from reality of the country, we are spending money in all these privileges like traveling to conferences or to do science basically. That’s the main characteristics and the main difference between him and the other presidents. The other presidents also didn’t give money to higher education, but at least they didn’t attack it directly.