CUBA-EDUCATION: University Education for All?

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 19 1996 (IPS) - Cuba has won the war against illiterary and established free education through to grade nine. Schools are public. Now the Caribbean island is considering the challenge of “university for all”.

Although the labour force is already highly educated, more university graduates will be needed to satisfy real economic needs.

A regional conference on transforming higher education here this week, faced the issue head-on, with participants citing the need to establish equal opportunities based on individual capability.

Convened by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the conference is the first in a series of regional meetings leading up to a special world conference on education in Paris in 1998.

Among the themes being discussed at the regional conference are quality and relevancy, finance, privatization, new technologies and international cooperation. One session will be dedicated to the Cuban experience.

With a population of 11 million, Cuba has more than 500,000 graduates from 46 university centres opened up by the government through the country.

“We dreamt of a country of university graduates but we didn’t realize that we also needed qualified workers to produce,” said Nelson Onate, professor of biology at the Havana pre-university centre.

For decades, engineering, medical or other university degrees are status symbols in Cuba, the object of desire by a large majority of people. For many, having a child “with a diploma” was a dream that could be achieved thanks to the revolution of 1959. Only by studying could one hope “to be something in life” and avoid going through life “bent over from one’s work.”

Nevertheless, open admissions at the university level created a much greater demand than the government of President Fidel Castro could fulfill, and lead to a labour crisis at the end of the 1980s.

A process of “rectification of errors and negative tendencies” initiated by the Communist Party in 1986, called attention to the contradiction between the high number of university graduates and the number of job openings for specialists.

But the areas of specialization sometimes seemed out of sync with the real labour needs of a developing country. This was one of the main challenges facing the government as it attempted to develop a policy of full employment.

In the second half of the 1980s, this situation became more worrisome as a generation of young people born in the 1960s prepared to enter the labour force.

Previously the system was criticised for giving preference to professional education not linked to the needs of production. Now the complaint is over the government’s decision at the beginning of this decade to reduce almost by half the number of new university admissions compared to the year 1988.

Sources in the National Office of Statistics said despite the economic crisis affecting the country, in 1995 the government would designate 10.4 percent of its gross internal product to education — a percentage significantly higher than the seven percent designated by most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

That year, there were 31,700 higher education graduates, 122,300 students were enrolled, and the country had more than 23,000 professors. There were some 1,114 students for each 100,000 inhabitants and 5.3 per professor.

In the study “Tendencies in the development of higher education in Cuba”, Fernando Vecino Alegret, the head of this division, revealed that until 1969, the only requirement to attend university was having completed the previous level of school.

Various academic departments began to set up their own admissions criteria involving a student’s grade point average from their previous academic years. Nevertheless, access to university was guaranteed for almost all who wanted to attend.

Not until the beginning of the 1980s did the Ministry of Higher Education establish university admissions examinations. And some academic departments began to demand aptitude tests to guarantee the preparedness of the student.

According to Vecino Alegret, higher education in Cuba grew from 15,000 students in 1956 to 35,000 in 1970, reaching a peak in 1979 with 200,000 students — two percent of the entire population at that time.

When the number of available places in the university was not sufficient to meet the demand, the government sent thousands of young people to study in the countries of the former European socialist bloc.

“I studied civil engineering, but there were Cubans studying languages and Spanish literature in Moscow. It was crazy but the important thing was that anyone who wanted to study had the opportunity to do it,” said Ana Bertha Gutierrez, who graduated in 1987.

Gutierrez was one of the more than 5,000 Cubans who, between 1982 and 1987, studied in the former Soviet Union only to return to the island to find that, in many occasions, the academic degree obtained abroad was not in synch with the reality of their country of origin.

Local experts declare that while Cuba can boast of a highly qualified labour force as one of its principal attractions for foreign investment capital, it is unable to satisfy the demands of this university-trained sector which sees immigration as the only path to realizing its professional dreams.