Things are looking up for the Javier Milei Presidency. After mustering the blocking Congress minority needed to uphold his veto of the legislative branch’s university financing bill against most expectations, followed the next day by finally pushing inflation below a monthly four percent, you could be forgiven for thinking things look rosy, but his administration is still a long way from being “condemned to success.” If Blanche DuBois “always depended on the kindness of strangers” in Tennessee Williams’ play, that may not be Milei’s fate forever but for a long time to come.
Perhaps precisely because the defence of current levels of university spending only had a fraction of the fiscal impact of the previously vetoed fuller updating of pensions. With education so crucial in the 21st century, Milei was generally given less chance of sustaining his veto this time around against a more solid majority, but a hodgepodge of a PRO caucus unlikely to tolerate being crowded out of the centre-right spectrum for much longer, a handful of Radical “heroes,” the support of the Misiones provincial government, some strategic absences and various other factors combined to more than double libertarian numbers to 84 deputies – less than a third of the 257-seat lower house but enough to deny the 159 guardians of state universities a two-thirds majority. Pensions and university financing have now been short-changed but any number of challenges considered urgent enough to override fiscal balance still lie ahead, ranging from the social deprivation of an impoverished majority to tax cuts wholly in keeping with libertarian doctrine.
A successful defensive strategy but the government needs to look beyond its combo of fiscal dogmatism and political pragmatism to take the offensive by insisting on the need to debate university education in depth with its financing only one aspect. This government lacks the political skills and social sensitivities to open up this discussion – by presenting the issue as purely fiscal, it has enabled the academic community to rally to an institutional and symbolic defence of public education as a whole instead of having to explain the current model, which does includes corporate privileges and mismanagement. On its side the government’s fiscal approach has been too lazy and too crude to pinpoint specific examples of squandering public funds, instead brandishing an indiscriminating “chainsaw” to bisect university education good and bad alike.
A debate on university education in its current model and not as an abstract concept needs to be started without including fiscal or other extraneous criteria but it must be approached carefully from both sides. Just as Kirchnerism has been very good at co-opting and corrupting noble causes like human rights, feminism and university education to cover a multitude of sins, so the Milei administration has been very good at throwing out babies with the bathwater. The many defects of the current model need to be mercilessly scrutinised and eradicated but also beware of the backlash and once higher learning has been cleansed of its flaws, its financing should indeed be made an absolute.
Both sides fall into the error of reducing this issue to a budget tussle without bringing up the major structural problems of university education. Can a drastically impoverished country afford the luxury of a free and unrestricted university entrance which simultaneously increases costs and lowers academic standards when primary schooling is so woefully deficient and around a third of students drop out of secondary schools? Can Argentina’s university system be defended when the percentage of graduates is less than half of any of its neighbours? Why is a conservative defence of this system considered more progressive than looking for alternatives which might release funds for more basic levels of education?
Universities should arguably be pressured to become more self-financing, for which fees could be a start – this would be more progressive than it sounds if accompanied by means-tested scholarships so that universities are free for lower-class talent and not merely those with the family backgrounds permitting them to postpone earning a living. But since scholarships would partially cancel out fees, it would be imperative to bring the private sector on board as in the rest of the world – this in turn might provide incentives guiding students towards more strategic career courses in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) area.
These are just some of the questions which the university establishment refuses to discuss but also the Milei government with its primitively fiscal approach. We can only conclude this editorial with the same words as last week’s – it’s the education, stupid!
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