Emir Olivares and Alonso Urrutia
La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, January 20, 2026, p. 9
Given the alert issued the previous week by the National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions (Anuies), in the sense that public financing for the sector this year is not enough to cover inflation, President Claudia Sheibaum Pardo stated: “there is no budget reduction for universities.”
Questioned about this yesterday morning, she insisted that her administration has suggested to public higher education institutions “that austerity schemes are very important; not for their substantive functions, but in terms of what bureaucratic expenses represent. We have insisted a lot on that; they are autonomous and they decide, but there is no reduction in the budgets of the universities.”
He noted that the Undersecretary of Higher Education of the Ministry of Public Education, Ricardo Villanueva Lomelí, works closely with all the autonomous universities on various issues, particularly on pensions. “Several of them have problems in that sense.”
In a public document released last week, Anuies expressed “deep concern” about the complex financial panorama faced by the country’s higher-level public institutions, due to the increase of 1.79 percent for state universities and 3 percent for federal universities, approved by the Chamber of Deputies in the 2026 Federation Expenditure Budget.
He pointed out that the resources are “clearly insufficient to attend to the substantive functions of our institutions and to meet the coverage goal set by the federal government,” and that “said increase will be practically exceeded compared to the inflation estimated by the Ministry of Finance of 3.5 percent, and the GDP deflator of 4.8 percent expected for this year.”
For this reason, he urgently called on the federal government, specifically the heads of the Secretariats of Finance and Public Education, to “seek the necessary mechanisms that allow the allocation of additional extraordinary resources in 2026 that are sufficient and irreducible in the future, to achieve at least the corresponding inflation and cover the salary policy.”
