Pedro Castillo’s promise puts public universities at risk

“The Ministry of Educationthe cabinet, already has the bill ready that will be sent to the Congress of the republic so that our children who finish high school have the opportunity of free access to the country’s universities” was what the president said peter castle last March 21.

This announcement was one of the many campaign promises – without foundation – that the president wants to make a reality before leaving the government. However, will this change really be beneficial for higher education and its students?

The Minister of Education, Rosendo Serna, announced that this project is almost finished, but that they must clarify what it will cost and wait for the opinion of other experts, as well as the cabinet of ministers and the president himself. He estimated that during this weekend they would be “agreeing on a proposal” to present it officially.

Strategy

For Jorge Mori, former general director of University Higher Education of the Ministry of Education, the responsibility for the proper functioning and organization of the project falls on the Minister of Education.

Mori explained that Pedro Castillo is in charge of putting the proposal on a plate through a more “political” message, but it is the head of Minedu and his team who are going to be in charge of “technically landing that political will”, so it should have a clear strategy on the subject.

He pointed out that a similar proposal was being worked on for 2021, consisting of three components; “The first is to establish a special admission modality for the best low-income students, a leveling scholarship and financing for vacancies in public universities,” but to achieve this, a larger budget would be needed.

The budget will depend on the dimension in which the strategy of free and progressive admission to higher education houses is carried out; however, currently the financing granted to national universities is quite low and most of them have management problems. The Ministry of Economy will have a lot to do with the approval of the proposal.

what should not happen

The Free Peru and Popular Action benches proposed bills in which they intended to approve “free, direct and universal” admission to universities. This would be a totally unfeasible proposal due to the large amount of budget that would need to be invested and the lack of control regarding the entrants; all this would mean a drop in the quality of education and, therefore, a direct attack on university reform.

Deans of the national universities of Piura, Arequipa and Lima indicated that they disagree if it is a massive income “overnight” and not progressive, as Minister Serna has indicated.

We asked the Ministry of Education if they could give us details about the project, which is almost finished, but they refused to provide us with the scope.

“The minister said that the president will make the announcement when everything is ready, that means there will be no information beforehand,” they responded from the Executive.

For its part, the National Superintendence of Higher University Education (Sunedu) indicated that they will not give opinions until the official document announced by Rosendo Serna is published.

“We are not declaring at the moment, since there is still no project and Minedu is directly seeing it,” they told Peru21.

KEEP IN MIND:

• On several occasions, Congress has presented bills that go against university quality.
• The Ministry of Education has not been blunt in rejecting the proposals in favor of the counter-reform. Neither do their representatives.
• Rosendo Serna announced that he would present the project to the experts.

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