Higher learning versus hire learning

Today is the first day of spring (autumn or fall on the other side of the Equator) but also Students’ Day (Día del Estudiante) in Argentina, thus providing the perfect peg for rounding out last Saturday’s column written on Teachers’ Day. That column climbed up the educational ladder but had almost run out of space by the time it reached higher learning, promising fuller treatment at some future date. Which is already today with the opposition university financing bill such a focal point of attention quite apart from Students’ Day.

Today’s column will therefore analyse university education but from a broader perspective than vetoes, marches or any current news. Any replay of the last university march protesting budget cuts on April 23 would point towards a one-sided debate – that demonstration rallied 1.5 million people nationwide with opinion polls showing at least two-thirds and as many as five out of every six Argentines solidly behind them. With education universally recognised as the key to the 21st century, universities must surely be seen as an investment rather than an expense and therefore immune from any budget cuts – so runs the majority logic.

And if the government response to the complex challenges facing higher education is nothing more than the chainsaw, such conventional wisdom would be absolutely correct. The Javier Milei administration would seem to have learned nothing from April – the 2025 Budget allots the universities exactly 3,804,206,408,806 pesos, less than half the system’s stated needs and not even allowing for the optimistic 18.3 percent inflation estimate in that same budget. Milei is being untrue to his principle proclaimed last Sunday evening of adjusting spending to the available revenue if he simply underfunds an unreformed system into extinction – this makes it too easy for often archaic universities to use the noble banner of education to cloak a multitude of sins.

There is no chance of improving the quality of higher education without doing something about the quantity of both universities and students. Argentina has 131 universities divided almost equally between public and private, including state universities in such remote locations as Saladillo or Chilecito in La Rioja, yet the libertarian government offers no hint of streamlining – even the Madres de Plaza de Mayo University which it constantly reviles is granted two billion pesos under the 2025 Budget. A ruthless and anti-federal suggestion no doubt (although it would not be the first display of ruthless or anti-federal thinking by the current government) but instead of simply halving university financing across the board, might not one option consistent with a transformation ethos be to close down marginal universities while properly funding the main centres of learning (such as UBA, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Rosario and Tucumán)? Taking such thinking one step further, if the Milei government is serious about modernising Argentina and entering the “white heat of technology” (in Harold Wilson’s Labour campaign phrase over six decades ago), it might consider skewing spending away from universities altogether and prioritise technical centres with the National Technological University in the forefront. If indeed centres of any kind, whether academic or technical, have a future with virtual decentralisation and Artificial Intelligence.

Not only are there too many universities but also too many students. Last Saturday’s column mentioned that this columnist’s alma mater of Cambridge is famous worldwide as a purely university town yet the Federal Capital (with 385,000 students in UBA alone), which is anything but, has a considerably higher student percentage! Plenty of students but rather fewer graduates. The proliferation of new universities in the past decade has trebled the students but the number of graduates is approximately the same as at the start of the century. The shibboleth of free, unrestricted university education is mostly to blame for this. In theory the ultimate democracy, it mainly serves middle-class mediocrity because as the brash libertarian deputy Alberto Benegas Lynch Junior brutally reminded us when proposing that education be voluntary last April, lower-class children are often more useful to their parents in the workshop than a classroom. Even when not mediocre, the middle classes tend to pursue the professional “careers” so traditional to Argentine university education (law, medicine, architecture, etc. if also engineering) – scholarships for the brightest and best of lower-class students would not only improve quality but make for a more practical and scientific bent.

Ending the tradition of free, unrestricted university education would not only imply the filter of entrance exams to improve quality but also fees to make these institutions more financially self-reliant. While Milei supporters like to present the universities as a monstrously bloated expense item, they are actually cheap by international standards – while university spending has never reached even one percent of Gross Domestic Product in Argentina except in 2012, it is two percent of GDP or more in most European and North American countries. This is basically because of a massive injection of private capital now accelerating in this technological age, often taking the form of endowments of up to a billion bucks at a time (Harvard alone commands some US$50 billion). Inconceivable in Argentina where such potential mega-buck endowments are among the quarter trillion kept outside the system – yet ending the total dependence on the state and convincing the private sector that it pays to pick up most of the bill is the real problem of university financing. But the ferocious state spending cuts in the areas of higher education and scientific research cannot be justified until that happens, whatever the need to shift the burden from the public to the private sector – Argentina cannot be made to run before it can walk. 

Having run out of space for universities in last Saturday’s column, today’s column, while far from exhausting that topic, does not have much room left for graduate work and scientific research other than to repeat that their “publish or perish” ethos needs to be replaced with perhaps longer-term work of more practical use to the productive sector. The world of CONICET must await another strategic moment.