Due to “financial stress”, public universities must make adjustments in 2025, says Anuies

Carolina Gomez Mena

La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, December 28, 2024, p. 6

In anticipation of a difficult outlook of financial stress For public universities in 2025, they must make adjustments that do not affect their educational work, said Luis González Placencia, general secretary of the National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions (Anuies), who highlighted that this adds a problem structural, non-compliance of state contributions that represent a debt of at least 10 billion pesos.

Last November, various universities were dissatisfied with the cut of more than 10,268 million pesos to higher education proposed by the Federation’s Expenditure Budget project. Finally, the Chamber of Deputies approved an expansion of 12,460 million pesos.

However, the budget scenario is complicated, so universities will have to review austerity programs that they deliver each year to reduce expenses in aspects in which it can be done sacrifice.

After proposing that next year the state public universities will have the same budget plus 3.5 percent of compensation to confront inflation, González Placencia exposed The Day that this will force you to have greater rationality in the use of resources.

We universities are going to adapt to the conditions that have arisen. We understand that the situation in the country is not comfortable and we will make the effort.

He explained that the amount that state governments provide to state universities is variable, since it is subject to a budget sufficiency clause. With that clause the governor decides how much he or she will give to the university. Ideally it should be 50 percent the state and 50 percent the Federation, but this is not usually achieved. Most entities give between 25 and 27 percent to universities if they do well, and if they do poorly, between 10 and 12 percent. That’s why the budget is in deficit..

The deficit of state resources and structural problems such as the payment of pensions, the debts that some institutions carry, for example Social Security, have led to the technical bankruptcy to some study houses.

Even some, according to Anuies data, this year had complications paying bonuses, so with the intervention of the group, it was possible for others with greater solvency to give them loans.

González Placencia specified that at the beginning of the previous six-year term there were 10 universities in that situation, but This year it was reduced to four: the autonomous institutions of Morelos, Nayarit, Sinaloa and Zacatecas.

He warned that although there has been progress, The risk is latent, we cannot say that they have already left, we save thembecause given the scarcity of federal and local resources, In the coming years more universities may go into technical bankruptcy.