One in three young people did not attend high school, expert warns

Lilian Hernandez Osorio

La Jornada Newspaper
Monday, November 4, 2024, p. 13

In the past six-year term, coverage in upper secondary education decreased, since a third of young people of age to attend this level did not enter high school and around 9 percent dropped out of their studies at some point.

Consequently, the proposal of the government of the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, represents simple patches that they will barely be able to reverse the decline, warned the specialist from the Institute of Research on University and Education (IISUE) of the UNAM, Juan Fidel Zorrilla Alcalá.

However, other academics foresee that with the disappearance of the single exam of the Metropolitan Commission of Public Institutions of Higher Secondary Education (Comipems) more places will be granted to young people, since they will not be excluded.

During the seminar 100 commitments for the second floor of the transformation, Zorrilla Alcalá lamented that 12 years after the mandatory high school diploma was established in the country, it is the date in which more than 33 percent of adolescents between 15 and 18 years old do not They are studying it, either because they have not completed secondary school or because they did not manage to enter a school appropriate to their needs.

The serious thing, he warned, is that those who did not complete upper secondary education They are condemned in their own generation to be at the lowest levels economically, and probably their descendants too.

He pointed out that the current government has the merit of identifying the challenge, but making it effective is what is complicated because it is not only achieving entry to this educational level, but also achieving the permanence of young people, since It is not enough that they arrive, but rather that terminal efficiency is improved which is currently very low. He explained that less than half of the last generations completed this degree of education.

However, Daniel Cobos Marín, IISUE postdoctoral fellow, celebrated the elimination of the single Comipems exam in the metropolitan area of ​​the Valley of Mexico, as he foresees that coverage will increase and little by little it will become mandatory in this highly populated area of ​​the country. .

He recognized that from 2012 to 2019, there was a sustained increase of 2 percent of new students in upper secondary education, which translated into a coverage of 61.7 percent in the national territory, but since then it has not risen and therefore universalization has not been achieved. Therefore, he considered that by eliminating the high school entrance test, school enrollment will be expanded and will no longer be a bottleneckbecause socially disadvantaged young people will have the possibility of entering a school without having to undergo a standardized exercise.