Last Wednesday’s massive march on behalf of state university financing was the opening act of a renewed confrontation finding both sides totally adamant with President Javier Milei bent on a veto of the Congress law exempting higher learning from his chainsaw and a united opposition equally determined to overturn the presidential ban while academics are in no mood to relax their pay demands but there is nevertheless a common denominator between the two sides – both reduce the issue to basically a question of money with the quality of university education entirely secondary.
In Milei’s book it is all about balanced budgets – if Argentina’s university system retained all its many defects except making a hole in the national pocket and even added others, he could not care less. With at least 70 percent of public opinion behind them in the entirely valid belief that education is the key to the 21st century, academic authorities are not inclined to yield in their insistence on the financing of an unreformed archaic university system being fully updated to inflation, clinging to the autonomy enshrined in the 1918 University Reform Law without offering any accountability. But no mention of any reforms from the other side either. When presenting the 2025 Budget in mid-September, Milei defined his fundamental fiscal principle as first defining the available revenue and then adjusting the spending to it – modernising the university system to that end could be an interesting application of that principle. But instead his primitive proposal is literally to cut university spending in half with his chainsaw.
Both sides should approach the issue the other way round – after first reaching consensus over education indeed being the key to this century, they should design the optimal system and then make its financing (including research facilities and decent academic salaries) an absolute with other items sacrificed if needed to balance the budget. An improved system need not be more expensive.
One obvious alternative to halving spending across the board would be to downsize the numbers of both universities and students prior to full financing. Universities in places like Chilecito (La Rioja), Merlo (San Luis) and Saladillo or Hurlingham with the excellent Universidad de San Martín so nearby would seem a needless luxury, especially with the opportunities for open universities offered by remote online classes. But rather than trimming the 66 state universities, the real issue here would be to challenge the shibboleth of free, unrestricted university education lacking any filter of entrance exams. The result is a student body (2.1 million) on an impossible scale out of all proportion to the professional job opportunities. The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) alone has 385,000 students of whom little over quarter of a million attend classes and only a quarter graduate while five-year courses take nine years on average to complete. Greater Buenos Aires slum kids miles away from higher learning in more than a geographical sense do not have nine years even if gifted whereas spoiled middle-class brats seeking to prolong their youth do. Hailed as a pillar of democracy, unrestricted entrance is an enemy of academic standards which only serves to pamper middle-class mediocrity. A poster at Wednesday’s march read: “University education is a right, not a privilege,” but in that sense it is privilege.
Ending free, unrestricted entry would not only improve quality but also provide fees to contribute to university financing (although scholarships would also be needed to broaden the student body beyond the affluent and means-testing introduced). Yet the real key lies elsewhere. While Argentine universities might seem impossibly bloated, they are actually cheap by international standards – whereas university spending is two percent of Gross Domestic Product in most European and North American countries, it has never reached one percent in Argentina except in 2012. This is because of a total dependence on the state here whereas developed countries have a massive input from the private sector, including billions in endowments (Harvard alone has US$50 billion). Convincing the private sector that education is the key to this century and to pick up most of the bill is perhaps the real challenge, not government policy.
But both sides can only see the money, it seems, with Milei slapping vetoes instead of offering alternatives while Wednesday’s march was not only less massive than April’s (approaching half a million instead of a million) but also narrower with its focus on salaries instead of university spending as a whole and with a greater organised labour component. Somebody needs to tell both: It’s the education, stupid.
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