LATIN AMERICA: Merit-Based Higher Education For All

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 18 1996 (IPS) - One of the big challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean in the 21st century will be to make higher education a possibility for all, with a foundation of equality based on merit and individual ability.

Laying the foundations for turning that utopia into reality is the main aim of roughly 600 academics, official delegates and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from throughout the region, who are meeting Monday to Friday in the Cuban capital.

Organised by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Regional Conference on Policies and Strategies for the Transformation of Higher Education is the first of a series of regional meetings preparatory to a 1998 global conference to be held in Paris.

“It is not only a question of defining what kind of university a country wants, but what kind of society it wants to build,” UNESCO’s director of higher education, Marco Antonio Diaz, said at the conference’s opening session on Monday.

The participants in this week’s conference are to draw up a regional plan of action based on debates on the quality and relevance of educational systems and administration and the search for financing, new technologies and international cooperation.

The need for radical changes in higher education is not a new idea. It was a key issue on the Agenda of Commitments towards a new role for higher education, approved in the region in 1991.

The UNESCO report “Education: a Hidden Treasure” drawn up last year demands the reform of administration of human resources and diversification in higher education.

UNESCO urges that the universities of poor countries form “elites necessary to their societies, in line with the real requirements of the economic and social setting.” Such elites should be trained on the basis of individual ability and equal access to higher learning, not money, which opens the door to the wealthier sectors of society and closes it to the less privileged.

“Ours is the most inequitable region of the planet,” said Luis Yarbazal, the director of the Regional Centre for Higher Education (CRESALC).

In spite of the expansion of higher education reported in the second half of the century, according to CRESALC sources, only 17.7 percent of the relevant age group is in tertiary education institutions in the region.

From 1950 to 1992, the number of students in the region registered in institutions of higher learning rose from 270,000 to eight million, the number of professors from 25,000 to one million and the number of institutions from 75 to 4,000.

But coverage in Latin America and the Caribbean is low compared to that of industrialised countries, where in the next decade 40 percent of jobs will require 16 years of studies.

Among the basic trends seen in the second half of the century are the expansion and diversification of higher education and an increase in private sector participation, internationalisation and the transformation efforts of some universities.

“In spite of the expansion of coverage, the quality and relevance of the education offered is inadequate in a majority of countries in the region,” according to CRESALC.

The students who have access to higher education in the region are affected by the decline in the number of class-hours and teaching methods and the low training level and salaries of professors.

International cooperation has generally helped train professors in accordance with the demands of industrialised nations, while contributing directly to the growing exodus of talent from the South to the North.

UNESCO experts underline that a radical transformation of higher education is essential for producing professors who respond to the demands of each society in an increasingly globalised world.

“We cannot put it off any longer,” warned Yarzabal, who said CRESALC hopes the conference participants are able to go beyond rhetoric and lay the foundations for action.