Public higher education in colombia is in crisis.

Guarantees

Public education as a universal right

high-quality

free

BUT

commodified

what the students done to halt it

privatized

through

Imported from U.S. universities and pervasive in Colombian private universities

neo-institutionalism

As part of the neoliberal restructuring of Colombia´s economy and state institutions

The government of President César Gaviria froze the budget assigned to public universities

forcing them

to seek external resources to function.

neo-classical economics

favoring

the expansion of mining, hydrocarbons, agri-business, urban real estate, and financial services in the Global South, and the development of technology and intellectual property rights at universities in the North, subsidized by governments and linked to multinational corporations.

disfavoring

the public universities

forcing them

to close, while others began to cut back on student residences and university cafeterias and to hire more and more adjunct professors, who, like their counterparts elsewhere, make up the majority of total faculty and work under precarious conditions

neoliberalism

Under the so-called “educational revolution”

aunched by President Álvaro Uribe in the early 2000s,

disfavoring

public universities

in Colombia saw a tripling of student quotas, while their assigned resources were adjusted only by inflation.

favoring

Colombia’s elite private universities

who would supply the existing demand for the professional education of the country’s middle class through subsidized credits

by extending loans and credits provided by the Colombian Institute of Education Credit and the Exterior (ICETEX).

the business sector

the government’s National Training Service (SENA), together with sub-standard, for-profit universities, would provide vocational training programs for the impoverished labor force in order to increase the competitiveness

international financial institutions

The job of the state, in this vision

is

to provide

credit

security

property rights

subsidizing the entry of the poor intro competitive markets to determine quality as well as the ability to pay tuition and fees.

Articles 67-69

which state that the role of the Colombian state is to help individuals and families by regulating markets between public and private universities

private institutions are systematically favored

through

accreditation

based on

criteria for “academic excellence”, in order to create a fiction of a meritocracy in one of Latin America’s most unequal societies in the world’s most unequal region.

to protest

On October 10, with the support of rectors, administrators, and professors, Colombia’s students called an indefinite strike

students are demanding

$1.4 billion dollars from the government in the course of ten years,

a doubling of its research budget

a freeze on tuition fees

the refinancing of student loans at a zero percent interest rate

preservation of funding for vocational and technical schools

respect for the right to protest and voluntary rather than mandatory accreditation

to re-open negotiations with the government, specifically with President Duque himself,

to

ensure the current semester will not be canceled, and to secure guarantees for the exercise of civil rights.

Since November 8, students, professors, clerical, and service workers have been joined by the public school teachers’ union (FECODE),

along

with the country’s progressive trade union federation (CUT), which has called for nationwide marches

The state

threat

During those days Alejandro Palacio, quoted in the epigraph, a spokesperson for the student movemen

the government’s contribution to public higher education

equaled

0.55 percent of GDP, since 2015 that number has fallen to 0.40 percent

The growing deficit has led to a process of

“informal privatization:”

this means

that universities have to finance themselves

by selling consultancies, market-oriented extension courses, and graduate programs at market rates, and, increasingly, by establishing research partnerships with large corporation

public universities need resources

the growing costs of new information technologies, laboratories, professional training, internationalization, and maintenance of the physical and administrative infrastructure

It has worsened

the already precarious disequilibrium between the resources provided by the government and the expenditures necessary to guarantee minimum quality standards.

public universities have a deficit

of