Students in a courtyard on the campus of the Francisco Gavidia University, a private institution in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Central American education experts point out that higher education in the isthmus, both public and private, is precarious and expensive, unaffordable to the working-class and the poor. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jan 30 2024 (IPS)

Decades of civil wars and a lack of long-term public education policies, among other problems, have made higher education in Central America precarious and costly in general.

In this region, made up of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, home to some 50 million inhabitants, the quality of education offered by public and private universities is poor, while costs are high even for those who can afford them.

Lagging behind

One way to measure the quality of higher education is through scientific production, which is almost nil in Central America."Unfortunately, higher education is not accessible to everyone, and this is unfair. A large number of graduates from public high schools do not have access to higher education." -- Oneyda Fuentes

“Higher education in Central America lags far behind in the scientific field,” Óscar Picardo, director of the Institute of Sciences at the private Francisco Gavidia University in El Salvador, told IPS.

To illustrate, Picardo pointed to the few patents or research products registered as their own creations by Central American universities, both public and private, in comparison with institutions in the rest of Latin America.

For example, he said, universities in Colombia have produced around 400 patents and Chilean universities around 800, while in Central America only the public University of Costa Rica (UCR) has produced 44.

In fact, two Costa Rican institutions stand out the most in the region: the UCR and the public Tecnológico de Costa Rica.

“We have very limited budgets for research, for attracting human talent, for retaining doctors, so we are left with a very complicated scenario,” Picardo said.

Investment in infrastructure has also been deficient, something that is quite clear to students in the region.

“The teachers have the knowledge, but the university falls short in technology, there is a lot of precariousness in that area,” Karla Rodas, a Salvadoran journalism graduate from the public University of El Salvador, told IPS.

Karla Rodas, a journalism graduate, visited the University of El Salvador in January to attempt to expedite her graduation process. In her view, professors have sufficient knowledge to teach, but the public institution lacks the necessary infrastructure to provide quality education. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Rodas, 30, visited the university on Jan. 23 to ask about her graduation process, because due to different circumstances it has been postponed since she finished her studies in 2018.

With regard to the lack of investment in infrastructure, she added: “When I was at the university, there was a studio to produce radio programs, but it was definitely not the best equipment. There were no cameras either.”

Yakeline Corea, a journalism student at the public National Autonomous University of Honduras, had a similar experience.

“The curriculum is fine, but the university does not have all the resources to have good infrastructure, good laboratories, suitable for the level that is being taught,” Corea told IPS from Tegucigalpa, the country’s capital.

The 21-year-old student said she decided to pursue a university degree because it opens a door to aspire to a better future.

Other young people must be creative in finding ways to attend university, such as Omar Hurtarte, a student of agricultural production systems engineering at the public San Carlos University of Guatemala, founded in 1676, which was the first in Central America and the fourth in the Americas.

Hurtarte, a resident of Mixco, 13 kilometers west of Guatemala City, the capital, said he had to set up a small business to support himself at the university, mainly because of the associated costs, such as transportation, food and internet.

Tuition is free at the region’s public universities, even though they are mostly autonomous institutions, but there are many other costs associated with studying, especially for students who live outside the capital cities.

“It’s a small enterprise. I got an oven to make pizzas and a large pot to make chicharrones (pork cracklings), here in Mixco, in order to finance my studies,” the 36-year-old student said.

He added: “Through agronomy, I seek specialized, technological knowledge to contribute to the development of sustainable and efficient agricultural practices.”

Hurtarte is one of the lucky few who can study at university in his country.

According to a study by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in Guatemala, a country of 19.6 million people, only 2.6 percent of the population between 18 and 26 years of age has begun university studies and the percentage of students who complete two years or more is even lower.

Figures from the Central American Higher University Council indicate that there are 242 universities in Central America, including the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-speaking Caribbean island nation that is part of the Central American Integration System.

Of this total, 27 are public and 215 are private, confirming the marked trend of privatization of the sector, not only in the isthmus but also in the rest of Latin America, as pointed out in a report published in 2023 by the specialized education website Educ@.

This growing trend, according to another report published by Educ@, is observed in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and El Salvador, while Cuba has exclusively public education. In Argentina and Uruguay, private higher education enrollment represents less than 25 percent of the total.

The San Carlos University of Guatemala, founded in 1676 and the first in Central America, is the main center of higher education in that nation, where only 2.6 percent of the population between 18 and 26 years of age has begun university studies and the percentage of students who complete two years or more is even lower. CREDIT: Ricardo Miranda / IPS

Poor management

Regarding the low quality of education in Central America, Juan Pablo Escobar, dean of the faculty of Humanities at the private Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala, said the situation is “sad and not very promising,” especially in public institutions.

However, he pointed out that the shortcomings are not so much in the teaching itself, but in the disorderly management and the lack of public investment adequate to the needs, in the case of the public universities.

“I would not question the professionals and professors, but rather the structure, the logic behind it, the administration. The investment in public universities is not what would be expected, it does not achieve the desired impact,” Escobar told IPS from Guatemala City.

The dean pointed out that in the region there are public and private universities that, despite the challenges to be overcome, are committed to training good professionals. Others teach from a purely technical point of view, while yet others see education merely as a business.

However, despite the bleak outlook, institutions are making efforts to improve. They have opted for international accreditation, an evaluation process carried out by specialized agencies that verify compliance with basic standards.

The social conflicts and civil wars in most countries of the region in the 1980s reduced the capacity of the States to invest in education.

And while Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were bleeding from their armed conflicts, Costa Rica experienced relative peace and was able to invest in health, education and other social areas, among other reasons that explain its progress in this area.

Both Picardo from El Salvador and Escobar from Guatemala concurred that in their countries there was no minimum political consensus to promote long-term educational strategies, but that this changed with the arrival of new governments.

Omar Hurtarte takes a break at the San Carlos University of Guatemala, where he is studying agricultural production systems engineering. To finance his studies, Hurtarte had to set up a small business making pizzas and pork cracklings. CREDIT: Ricardo Miranda / IPS

High costs

Higher education is also expensive in Central America even for those who can afford it, and excludes the majority of the population, who have scarce resources.

“Unfortunately, higher education is not accessible to everyone, and this is unfair. A large number of graduates from public high schools do not have access to higher education,” Oneyda Fuentes, a student of English language translation and interpretation at the private Evangelical University of El Salvador, told IPS.

Fuentes, 32 years old and in her second year of university, said she pays 100 dollars a month in tuition for online classes.

But last year, she explained, she took a course in person, which cost her 200 dollars a month, including related expenses, since she had to commute from her native Nejapa, a small town located 20 kilometers north of San Salvador, the country’s capital.

Fuentes pays for her studies with the freelance work she already does as a translator and interpreter, having previously taken English classes.

At the beginning of 2024, the minimum wage in El Salvador, which varies according to economic sectors, is around 300 dollars a month, similar to those of Honduras and Panama, while in Guatemala it averages 400 dollars and in Costa Rica it is close to 700 dollars, according to official data from each country.

In this context, the cost of studying at university in Central America is high, even in the public universities, which by law are free. This is true especially for young people from rural areas who must rent an apartment and pay for food in the cities where the campuses are located.

“When I decided to study, I moved to Tegucigalpa, because if I had to travel from my village, it was a 6-hour bus ride,” said Corea, the Honduran student, who is originally from El Membrillo in the municipality of Yaramanguila, in the southwest department of Intibucá.

She said she spends an average of 240 dollars a month to cover her expenses.

Although very few, in Central America there are also institutions that cater to upper-middle and upper-class students, which charge monthly fees of between 500 and 600 dollars.

At institutions focused on the middle classes, such as Rafael Landívar, run by the Catholic Society of Jesus, a degree in psychology can cost 275 dollars a month, said Dean Escobar.

“Higher education in Guatemala is very expensive. I say this as a PhD in education, as a dean and as a father, since I have two children already in university,” he said.

For his part, Picardo, the Salvadoran academic, commented that in education there is the paradox that, in order for it to be of good quality, it has to receive funds from somewhere.

“You cannot sustain a campus, a good level teaching staff, with good level laboratories, without financial backing; quality education is expensive,” he said.

Edinburgh Castle, symbol of the Scottish capital, whose university has just decided not to disinvest in fossil fuels. Photo credit: Kim Traynor/CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Kirsty Haigh, Eric Lai, and Ellen Young
EDINBURGH, May 17 2015 (IPS)

The University of Edinburgh has taken the decision to not divest from fossil fuels, bowing to the short-term economic interests of departments funded by the fossil fuel industry, with little to no acknowledgement of the long-term repercussions of these investments.

The decision, which was announced on May 12, exemplifies the influence that vested interests have gained over academic institutions in the United Kingdom.“Our university has decided to take a reactionary approach to climate change, failing to make any statement of commitment to the staff and students who have been demanding divestment from fossil fuel companies for the past three years”

Collectively, U.K. universities invest over eight billion dollars in fossil fuels, more than 3,000 dollars for every student. The University of Edinburgh has the country’s third largest university endowment, after Oxford and Cambridge, totalling 457 million dollars, of which approximately 14 million is invested in fossil fuel companies, including Total, Shell and BHP Billiton.

Our university has decided to take a reactionary approach to climate change, failing to make any statement of commitment to the staff and students who have been demanding divestment from fossil fuel companies for the past three years.

Announcing it decision, the university said: ”The university will withdraw from investment in these [fossil fuel consuming and extracting] companies if: realistic alternative sources of energy are available and the companies involved are not investing in technologies that help address the effects of carbon emissions and climate change.”

However, given the fossil fuel industry’s continued destruction of the planet, the university’s approach leaves far too much to the imagination and indeed allows for the potential to not divest from harmful industries at all.

We are going to find our existence completely altered – and in a way that we do not want – if   we do not stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and we know the big fossil fuel companies have no intention of stopping.

Climate change not only poses a massive economic threat but also presents the world’s biggest global health hazard – and its effects are hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest. The University of Edinburgh is fundamentally failing to acknowledge the part it is playing in funding climate chaos.

Our university claims to be a “world leader in addressing global challenges including … climate change” but if the university had any desire to take the moral lead, it would have divested. Divestment would have seen Edinburgh join a global movement of universities and numerous other forward-thinking organisations in divorcing itself from the tightening grip of the fossil fuel industry.

The University of Edinburgh came down firmly on the side of departments funded by the industry which have been scaremongering throughout the process

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have revealed, for example, that the university’s Geosciences Department has received funding from a range of fossil fuel companies over the past 10 years, including BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips, as well as grants and gifts of money from Total and Cairn Energy.

Sixty-five students in the university’s School of Engineering have already signed an open letter to the Head of the School, Prof Hugh McCann, angered by his public opposition to fossil fuel divestment.

Their letter states: “The School of Engineering has and will continue to have a pivotal role in the university’s future. It is after all engineers who will be on the frontlines of the transition to a low carbon society.

“By basing its argument against divestment on engineering students’ chances of employment in one dead-end industry, the school appears to be failing to prepare its students for careers in the rapidly changing energy markets of the 21st century, whilst neglecting the faculty’s broader responsibility to the student body as a whole. As a consequence, they gamble employment against our common future.”

Divesting is a way of taking on and dismantling the big fossil fuel companies and the power they hold over our society and governments. We rightly condemn companies that do not pay their taxes or who exploit their workers, and so we must do this to the companies who are threatening our very existence.

Divestment is also about creating more democratic institutions where those who are part of universities can have a say in how their money is spent and invested. The university’s announcement has shown that we still have a long way to go in creating transparent, democratic and ethical institutions. It brings into question the validity of the university’s decision-making process.

For the past three years, students, staff and alumni have supported full divestment – yet the University of Edinburgh has ignored their calls. The consultation run by the university found staff, students and the public in favour of ethical investment. A year later we still have zero commitment to change.

A process which began with promise has been allowed to descend into a complete breakdown in communication between students and the university. Serious questions need to be asked about why the decision was taken in favour of the views from the university’s Department of Geosciences, which freely admits its vested interested in maintaining the status quo for financial reasons.

The University of Edinburgh needs to invest in alternatives to dirty and unhealthy energy sources. These alternatives will create new jobs, so that when the fossil fuel industry ceases to exist there is something to replace it and our students are trained to work in it.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

2015 is shaping up to be ''The Year of Cli-Fi'' in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well. Credit: Tulane Public Relations/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

From Columbia University in New York to the University of Cambridge in Britain, college classrooms are picking up on the “cli-fi” genre of fiction, and cinema and academia is right behind them.

While authors are penning cli-fi novels — with movie scriptwriters creating cli-fi screenplays to try to sell to Hollywood — classrooms worldwide are now focusing attention of the rising genre of literature and cinema."Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?" -- Prof. Jenny Bavidge

Jenny Bavidge at the University of Cambridge taught a class on cli-fi last summer at the Institute of Continuing Education there, and Darragh Martin is teaching a cli-fi class at Columbia University in Manhattan this summer, too.

Cli-fi is a catchy abbreviation for the genre of “climate fiction,” much in the same way that “sci-fi” is a nickname for “science fiction.” With news articles about the rise of cli-fi appearing in the New York Times and Time magazine last year, literature professors saw an opportune time to introduce cli-fi classes into the curriculum.

“Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?” Bavidge asked students in her introduction to the class last summer. “This course will focus on works by contemporary authors, including Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, and ask whether ‘cli-fi’ imagines solutions as well as ends.

“As people living through this particular historical moment, we may want to ask how far [cli-fi] novels contribute to efforts to better understand our relationship with the planet and its ecosystems,” she wrote

One of my mentors in the world of sci-fi literature is the novelist David Brin.

I once asked him about how climate change themes have been influencing sci-fi novels and movies, and he told me by email: “Global warming and flooding were important in my 1989 novel ‘Earth,’ but they were earlier featured in the film ‘Soylent Green’ based on Harry Harrison’s novel ‘Make Room, Make Room!’”

Six U.S. colleges have set up cli-fi classes this year, with both undergrad and graduate level courses involved. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This year, 2015, is shaping up to be ”The Year of Cli-Fi” in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well.

Several non-English speaking countries are also looking at cli-fi and how it impacts their own literary circles, including Brazil, Spain, Germany and France.

While six universities and colleges in the United States have taken up the call and are part of the new trend in higher education in 2015, the genre is reaching out worldwide to writers (and readers) across the globe. Cli-fi is not an American or British genre; it has become a global genre.

The Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper in Washington, D.C., which covers academic issues in a variety of subject areas, has assigned a staff reporter to look into the rise of cli fi in the academy as well, according to sources.

In addition to Martin’s summer class at Columbia, which starts on May 27, professors at Temple University in Philadelphia, the University of Oregon, Holyoke Community College, the State University of New York in Geneseo (SUNY Geneseo) and The University of Delaware are currently teaching cli-fi classes this semester, with a total of about 200 students nationwide enrolled.

It’s a beginning. And there’s more to come.

Academics writing in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, among other world languages are putting out papers about cli-fi and planning classes in the genre at the universities where they teach.

There is, of course, a long and storied history of teaching sci-fi at colleges in North America and Britain, with several universities even setting up literature departments that specialise in sci-fi research. Now cli-fi is joining the global academic world and finding a room of its own there as well.

Elizabeth Trobaugh and Steve Winters at Holyoke Community College are team-teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester titled “Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

When I told Trobaugh that I planned to write an oped about her course, she replied: “Thank you for your interest in what we are doing this semester. Professor Winters and I thought we were onto something, and your email confirms our conviction that cli-fi is indeed on the rise, and this is the moment (as Macklemore says in the song) to catch the wave.”

Stephen Siperstein, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, is also teaching a cli-fi literature class this semester, with his undergrad students posting weekly class blogs about what they are reading and how they are reacting to the new genre of fiction.

At Temple University, Ted Howell is teaching an undergraduate class titled “Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse” with about 30 students enrolled. They are also keeping weekly blogs about the course, using them to interact online outside of class with their professor and fellow students.

At SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York, Professor Ken Cooper is teaching a class this semester titled “Reader and Text: Cli-Fi.”

”Representative works will include Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Windup Girl,’ Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior,’ and other novels,” Cooper told his students by way of introduction, adding mischievously: “There will be at least one zombie apocalypse, too.”

Siohban Carroll at the University of Delaware is a specialist in 19th century British literature, and told me in a recent Tweet: “I’m teaching a 19th Century ‘cli-fi’ class right now at the graduate level. One segment is on Mary Shelley and the Anthropocene.”

So there you have it. Cli-fi has reached into academia and found partners on college campuses. It’s a worldwide trend because global warming impacts us all, and literature and cinema always respond to the things that matter.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Students at a post-film discussion on human rights. Credit: Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda

By Marcela Valente
Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Nine of the 47 tuition-free public universities in Argentina were created in the last decade, with the aim of improving access to higher education in low-income areas. But despite the expansion and strategies to provide support for students, the drop-out rate has proven difficult to combat.

One result of this policy of inclusiveness is that “80 percent of new students (in the new universities) are the first generation in their family to attend university,” Martín Gill, secretary of university policies at the Education Ministry, told IPS.

Five of the new universities are located in Avellaneda, José C. Paz, Merlo, Moreno and Florencio Varela, which are among the most populous districts with the highest number of working-class households and the lowest incomes in the poor suburbs surrounding Buenos Aires.

The other four founded in the last 10 years, during the centre-left administrations of the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his wife and successor President Cristina Fernández, are in the provinces of Chaco (northeast), Río Negro (south), San Luis (west-central) and Tierra del Fuego (far south), where previously there had been no public universities.

“University education is a right and the state must guarantee it,” said Gill.

The government is offering more living expenses scholarships to complement this policy, Gill said. “Although our public universities are free, for too long only better-off students who lived close by could benefit,” he said.

The total number of state scholarships for students from low-income families increased from 2,000 in 2003 to 47,000 in 2013, and half of them currently go to students who have chosen one of 200 scientific and technological degrees prioritised by Argentina’s development programme.

Proximity and quality

Gill said the new universities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires “are small, flexible units” that have a strong local identity while maintaining high standards of educational quality.

He mentioned, for example, the Biotechnology Centre at San Martín National University, “the largest of its kind in Latin America;” the petroleum engineering programme at the new Arturo Jauretche National University in Florencio Varela; and the economics department established at the Moreno National University.

He also highlighted research work at Quilmes National University, created before 2003 but part of the educational expansion plan. Scientists there, working with researchers at other schools in Argentina and in Cuba, have developed a therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer, which will be available from this July to treat patients in addition to radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Gill said that when the policy was launched to open public universities in the poor suburbs known as the “Conurbano”, the idea was to decentralise the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), founded in the capital city in 1821.

While UBA has maintained its enrolment of over 300,000 students because of its high national and international prestige, the new universities and campuses on the outskirts of the city enrolled 67,000 young people this year. “It’s a policy that generates pronounced upward social mobility,” Gill said.

According to the Education Ministry, student enrolment at the country’s universities rose 28 percent in the last 10 years, while the number of students graduating climbed 68 percent. Public spending on higher education increased from 0.5 to 1.02 percent of GDP in the same period, and between 2001 and 2010, while the population grew 10 percent, the number of people with higher education rose by 54 percent.

This South American country of more than 40 million people devotes 6.5 percent of GDP to education, the highest proportion alongside Brazil in Latin America after Cuba, which spends over 12 percent of GDP on education, according to data from 2010 published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Drop-out rate, a tough nut to crack

Jorge Calzoni, an engineer who is president of Avellaneda National University, told IPS that over 6,000 students have enrolled since the university was created in 2009, including some 300 foreigners.

The university offers two-year programmes, vocational-technical studies, bachelor’s degrees and graduate studies in 25 different subject areas. “We were not created to compete with the large universities, but to complement them,” Calzoni said.

As a result, instead of offering medical studies, which are taught at nearby universities, Avellaneda National University offers vocational studies and undergraduate degrees in nursing, for instance. It also has courses in tourism, sports and recreation, computer engineering and design, among others.

But Calzoni said drop-out rates remained high, in spite of the three catch-up seminars taught to new students “to bring them up to an acceptable level to prevent failure in the first year.” Students are also given support by tutors and teaching assistants.

“Even so, 47 percent drop out,” he said. “Half of the students who enrol do not come back for the second semester.” He said, however, that some of them change subjects or universities, while others return later.

Avellaneda University’s entrance course includes a survey which found that 84 percent of new students are from families where the parents did not attend university – in other words, they are the first generation to attain higher education.

Calzoni said the new university was located in an area with unmet demand, as shown by the age of the students. The first year it opened, the average age was 34.

“These students had not been able to access higher education previously, and now they saw an opportunity, perhaps because of location.” The average age declined gradually to 28, and now to 24, he said.

Gill also emphasised that the policy of inclusion allowed the hearing impaired and other people with disabilities to become students, along with large numbers of young people from other Latin American countries.

“They come from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru,” he said. “Argentina has a model of higher education with unparalleled access.

“Eighty percent of university students in the country are at public universities,” said Gill.

But he noted that there are also 49 private universities around the country, which offer a great variety of courses.