COLOMBIA: Deadlock over education reform continues

Colombian university student representatives decided at a meeting in Bogotá on 15-16 October to continue their strike and mass protests until the government withdraws its higher-education reform proposal from parliament. On 13 October the largest nationwide protests held for many years left one student dead and eight severely injured.

The student protest centers around uneasiness over the recent reform of a 1992 law on higher education that aims to improve quality and increase coverage. Many feel it will lead to the privatisation of higher education and financial collapse of public universities.

The proposed reform would extend access to 50% of eligible students by 2014 and 64% by 2022; increase resources by almost US$56 million between 2012 and 2022, and create 600,000 new undergraduate and 45,000 postgraduate places by 2014.

Currently, only two Colombian universities rank among the top 500 in the world, 13.5% of university teachers have PhDs and only 37% of the country has access to higher education.

Under the reform proposal, lower-income students would not need to pay interest on loans and would receive a government subsidy. They would start repaying loans only when their earnings reached a certain level.

But some see the proposal as unrealistic.

Bernardo Rivera, executive director of the Colombian Association of Universities, told the newspaper El Espectador that "only 80 universities have quality certification and just 700 out of 3,500 programmes offered have been accredited to a high standard".

Rivera said the money offered by the government was not enough to provide high quality education for the 600,000 new places proposed, not to mention the 95,000 of them that would be in public universities, a figure most students consider too low.

Moisés Wasserman, rector of National University, one of Colombia's two top universities, added that the resources promised would not get public universities out of debt, which amounts to almost $350 million according to figures provided by student representatives.

Students also pointed out that the sum the government now allocates to public universities per registered student would be cut back in the new proposal.

"The government plans to devote only around $260 per student in the coming years, compared to an average of $1,825 today. Under this scheme, universities will have to put in the remainder, or will be condemned to academic mediocrity," a student spokesperson told ABC Digital, a radio service in Paraguay.

The Colombian Association of Public Universities has asked the government to "state clearly that the budget allocations for public universities are a minimum, not a maximum. The funds must also be consistent with the targets for coverage and quality proposed."

Bowing to protests by students, the government excluded for-profit universities from its original proposal, leaving in public, private and mixed higher education institutions.

But students are dissatisfied because the proposal still allows public universities to associate with private companies, something they consider a recipe for privatisation.

Students also complain that they were not consulted. However, Minister of Education María Fernanda Campo has stated several times that some 4,500 students and teachers have expressed their views in more than 28 regional forums.

Campo is weary about the comparison between the student protests in Colombia and Chile:

"For example in Chile 20% of young people study in public universities compared to 55% in Colombia; the tuition fee charged in that country is similar to that of our private universities; and the interest on student loans in Chile is so high that students take almost 20 years to repay them," she said recently at a public ceremony in Cocorná, Antioquía.

In Colombia there are 1.8 million higher education students, of whom at least 690,000 attend private institutions. Only some of are participating in the protests, Campo told Colombia's RCN radio.