June/July 2007

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• Nigeria: Higher Education Needs Urgent Attention
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• Mexico: Higher Education Decentralizes
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You are here: Home > Products > Federations Magazine > June/July 2007 > Higher Education Decentralizes

special section: post-secondary education -mexico

Higher Education Decentralizes

Growth of private universities marks a change in traditional system

By Roberto Rodríguez -GÓmez

The major political changes that reshaped Mexico in the 20th century have been crucial in transforming the country’s higher education system. This
transformation of higher education took place while Mexico was undergoing even greater changes: moving from a one-party to a multi-party democracy and responding to an era of privatization.

Access to higher education was very limited in Mexico before 1950, owing to the small number of institutions at this level and, above all, to the small proportion of the population who had completed basic education. In 1950, Mexico had less than 24 institutions of higher education with a total enrolment of about 30,000 students. After a period of extraordinary expansion in the 1970s, enrolment had reached more than 800,000
students.

The diversification process in post-secondary education gained momentum in the 1980s and has intensified and matured in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Key elements in this process included:
• An increase in private investment that caused enrolment in private higher education institutions to climb to one-third of the total for the country, and to 40 per cent for the graduate studies level. One factor in this growth is the public system’s failure to meet demand and the lack of rigorous academic
quality control.
• Promotion of high-tech studies in the public sector.
• Creation of almost 20 new public institutions in the states, by the federal government, with the participation of state governments.
• Decentralization of state public universities, including the creation of facilities in cities that are not state capitals.

As a result, the post-secondary education system doubled its enrolment between 1990 and 2006 to 2.5 million students from 1.2 million.

Federal Financing Changed in 1997
The growth of post-secondary education has been greatly affected by a 1997 amendment to the Fiscal Coordination Law, an integral part of Mexico’s new federalism. This budget amendment introduced the concept of “support funds” to supplement the contributions in the National Fiscal Coordination System. It was instituted to improve the public treasury’s tax coordination functions and facilitate the decentralization of public services.

Federal and state responsibilities for spending programs and oversight were also specified within this new budget framework. Under it, federal agencies are accountable for the global calculation of the budget to be transferred to each state, and the state records the funds received in their own accounting systems. To reduce the risk of state and municipal entities using resources provided by this law for other activities, a formula of “earmarked funds” was
adopted and control mechanisms were established.

This granting of earmarked fiscal resources to the states for education has been a key incentive for encouraging more investment in education, particularly when these funds can be used for programs such as teacher training for basic education and high-tech programs.

The new mechanism for providing funds coexists with more flexible instruments for allocating decentralized expenditures, including programs subject to operating rules approved each year in the federal budget, as well as joint federal-state agreements to finance specific programs. The joint agreements have been used to meet states’ demands for the creation of new public institutions, or to increase the subsidies granted to state universities. Also, autonomous federal and state public universities have taken steps to obtain special allocations directly from the federal congress.

Public and Private Universities Compete
Mexico has nearly 800 public institutions which enrol two-thirds of the 2.6 million post-secondary students. The state universities, which account for roughly one-half of the public sector enrolments, are autonomous and receive both federal and state subsidies. Federal universities and technological
institutes, now a much smaller post-secondary presence, are maintained largely with federal funds. The decentralized technological institutes are legally dependent on the states and are financed through concurrent subsidies.

For the most part, training of teachers is handled by 276 public institutions that enrol about 95,000 students – four per cent of enrolments – and are subsidized through funds transferred to the states.

The 27 public research centres, subsidized with federal funds in the science and technology sector and some state subsidies, provide graduate education to more than 3,000 students.

The private sector is the fastest growing segment of post-secondary education in Mexico. There are now more than 1,200 private institutions that enrol roughly one-third of all students. These private institutions are picking up much of the growing demand for post-secondary education and the trend will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Continuing Tensions Unresolved
Despite advances toward decentralization and federalization of post-secondary education, there are significant tensions and dilemmas that call for broad solutions. One key problem is the lack of coordination and regulation with a federal approach, though the federal education authority still retains important powers in the field of curriculum orientation of the sectors it coordinates, particularly in high tech education and teacher training.

Quality-control policies focused on the public universities of the states, based on the provision of additional federal resources, also demonstrate a centralist bias as they continue to be regulated and governed exclusively by the federal authority. Finally, there is a lack of norms for the stable regulation of federal and state powers in this area. No less important is the obvious tension between the autonomy granted by law to most federal and state public universities and the influence of federal public policies on the institutions.

Mexico’s road leading from a higher education system that is extensively decentralized, but subject to central public policies, to a truly federal system formed by multiple state systems still lies ahead.

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Roberto Rodríguez-Gómez is professor and researcher at the Social Sciences Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the National Researchers System and has a PhD in Social Sciences (Sociology).