EDUCATION-VENEZUELA: University Doors to Open Wider

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Oct 7 2003 (IPS) - A half-million secondary school graduates in Venezuela will have the chance to enter university after two decades in which they have been refused admission due to limited space.

The government’s new "Mission Sucre" – under fire from academics who question its merits in terms of educational quality – aims to absorb 30,000 of the 200,000 young people who complete secondary school annually and, over the years, have been left outside the halls of higher education.

"This is about tackling society’s, and the state’s, debt to the hundreds of thousands of secondary school graduates who never obtained admission and have been left behind year after year," Héctor Navarro, minister of higher education, told IPS.

In the past few weeks, the government sent 550,000 application forms to graduates who have not entered university, regardless of when they completed secondary school.

Already 420,000 have sent in responses that will be processed next year, Navarro said.

In Venezuela, with 24 million inhabitants and eight million students (in primary, secondary and higher education), there are approximately 800,000 students in 41 universities and another 152 tertiary-level institutions with programmes of three to five years – including both state and private sector.

The expansion of private universities pushed up the number of slots for students in higher education, but generally only benefited young people from the middle and upper classes who can afford the costly tuition.

The quotas for students entering higher education have until now been based on an academic aptitude test taken at the National Council of Universities, though some institutions add their own requirements as well.

Minister Navarro believes the aptitude test and grade reports should be replaced by an exam that places more emphasis on vocation.

His opinion arises from the two-decade decline in the number of lower-income students entering the public universities, in stark contrast to the increase in students from the upper strata of society.

In 1984, of the 5,612 secondary school graduates of the wealthiest 20 percent of the population who sought university admission, 55 percent passed the aptitude test, while in 1998 nearly all of the 4,647 students from that group were admitted to university.

Meanwhile, the poorest 20 percent saw just the reverse. In 1984, nearly 71 percent of the 1,885 who sought university admission were accepted, while in 1998, only 20 percent of the 1,993 applicants did.

"I have been waiting for six years and I haven’t been admitted to university in Caracas or in other parts of the country. Finally I have the chance, and I hope to study social communications," Daniela Quintero, 25, told IPS as she waited in a long queue of applicants.

The case of María de Sánchez, who completed secondary school 18 years ago, is quite different.

"I was married soon after finishing secondary, and I dedicated myself to our small family business, and I had children. If I’m admitted, I’d like to study education. After next July, I could go to class at the same time as my oldest son, who is in his last year of secondary school," she told IPS.

The Mission Sucre plan for massive admissions to university, named for Antonio José de Sucre, one of South America’s independence leaders, comes in the wake of other social projects initiated this year by a government besieged by an opposition movement that is trying to unseat President Hugo Chávez.

The Chávez administration launched the Mercal programmes, distributing food at reduced prices from 100 locations around the country, ‘Barrio Adentro’, which deploys Cuban doctors to the poor neighbourhoods of Caracas, and the Robinson project, which seeks to teach a million adults to read and write within a matter of months.

On the higher education front, Mission Sucre comes just after the government finalised its Bolivarian University project, with 6,000 students – 4,000 in Caracas and 2,000 in the northwestern city of Maracaibo.

At the Bolivarian University, the students have immediate access to courses of study like social communications, community promotion, environmental engineering, public health administration, economy and international relations.

A notable feature of this university is that it will operate from the offices that used to belong to the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, unoccupied since 18,000 of its 39,000 employees were fired for taking part in the December-January strike against the Chávez government.

Giuseppe Gianetto, president of the public Central University, the country’s largest, said in comments to IPS that "the creation of the Bolivarian University is justified because the state must support the secondary school graduates who demand further education, and even more when education remains a means for social ascent."

But "it remains to be seen if the university’s quality will be backed by adequate infrastructure, equipment, curricula and professors," said Gianetto, who is also head of the association of university rectors and is openly opposed to the Chávez government.

As for Mission Sucre, "the demagogic offer to admit so many students is part of the government’s electoral strategy, which is faced with a recall referendum," he said, referring to the opposition movement’s campaign for a vote in 2004 on whether Chávez should remain in office.

Minister Navarro has taken note of the challenge. "We continue in the search for locations, not only in the universities and other institutions of higher learning, but also in secondary schools, because what we are looking for is a lot of ‘podium’ and little laboratory, in other words, courses that are not too costly and which have greater professor-student contact."

The objective of Mission Sucre, says Navarro, is to support the excluded population. "This doesn’t mean we renounce the ‘hard’ sciences and technical requirements, which the universities must pursue," he said.

The project has a price tag of 25 million dollars, just 1.2 percent of the 2.1 billion dollars (two percent of Venezuela’s gross domestic product) estimated for the overall public higher education budget in this country for 2004.

Additionally, Chávez announced that the first 100,000 students entering higher education through Mission Sucre who demonstrate they have limited incomes would qualify for a 100-dollar monthly stipend. Sixty percent of Venezuelans live in some degree of poverty.

The stipend is equivalent to two-thirds of the minimum monthly urban salary in Venezuela. IPS learned that the 120 million dollars annually for this assistance programme is to come from revenues of state-run enterprises.

Most of the public universities in Venezuela do not charge tuition, and students need only pay registration fees and some other "extras". But some institutions charge their students, taking advantage of the autonomy with which they operate.

Some observers suggest that projects like the Bolivarian University, and to some extent Mission Sucre, serve also to train professionals that are sympathetic to the changes promoted by Chávez’s so-called "Bolivarian Revolution", in which the president invokes the figure of South American Liberator Simón Bolívar.

This has awakened some resistance to the initiatives among public employees from the middle and lower rungs of the state hierarchy.

"Courses of study such as social development promoter or environmental manager are aimed at training not specifically civil servants, but rather professionals, who in addition to observing problems get involved in the community and act as leaders in carrying out their projects," Navarro said.

In general terms, "we have a political and social project for the country, established in the constitution, and we are not going to train professionals who act against the constitution," the minister said.

"We want professionals who defend and develop the political and ideological project set forth in this constitution."