The insufficient budget affects the educational system, regrets Cárdenas Solórzano

Laura Poy Solano

La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, January 31, 2026, p. 9

Upon receiving the doctorate honoris causa awarded by the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) for his outstanding career and contribution to the consolidation of democracy in Mexico, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano highlighted the important work carried out by this educational institution 90 years after its creation, which, he said, “was given in the most important libertarian impulse and social demands that has ever been given to make the objectives of the Mexican Revolution a reality.”

However, he warned about the quality problems of the national educational system. He added that when the priority of teaching that “is always proclaimed remains in discourse and is not translated into facts, budgets become insufficient, gaps are not overcome and educational offers are not expanded to the extent of demands.”

Training Opportunity

Founded in 1936 by President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, the IPN, he added, was born with two fundamental purposes: to open training opportunities to young people who did not have them within their reach and to provide the country with well-trained personnel in technical disciplines, in order to promote autonomy in the country’s development.

Accompanied by the general director of the institute, Arturo Reyes Sandoval, he highlighted that the institute went from serving 15,500 students in its first year of existence to a current enrollment of 224,000 students. Of them, two thirds study a degree among the 47 engineering courses it offers, 12 medical-biological disciplines and 12 more in social and administrative sciences. In addition, it already has a presence in 25 states.

Decisive factor in social equity

At the ceremony in the IPN council room on the Zacatenco campus, attended by polytechnic authorities, family and friends of the winner, but to which the media were not invited, Cárdenas Solórzano affirmed that education has been a decisive factor in social equity and opportunities for progress.

“Social mobility in Mexico and Latin America operates largely through higher-level public institutions, which explains their vigorous presence, which becomes more essential every day. They are a multiplying factor of social, cultural, technological and economic development. And without them, obscurantism in all its manifestations would be reborn,” he stressed.

The problems of quality and efficiency of the educational system in Mexico, he indicated, extend to all levels “due to financial, methodological, socioeconomic, planning, objectives and, of course, political-ideological issues.”

He highlighted that to make the IPN more useful to the nation, it is necessary to grant it a larger budget, since for several years it has not exceeded 20 billion pesos annually, with an average investment per student of 93 thousand pesos.

In addition, he considered it essential to return to the IPN the responsibility of setting the editorial line of Channel 11, as well as granting it management autonomy. He indicated that there must also be greater and better integration of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies and the IPN, to have greater coordination and closeness in research and technological development activities.

Reyes Sandoval highlighted the outstanding career of Cárdenas Solórzano, whom he considered a “brother of origin” for the polytechnics, with whom they share the ideals that gave life to the institution to strengthen sovereignty with the training of professionals in technique and technology, and thereby consolidate the progress and well-being of the population.