The government presented its draft education reform.
The reform deteriorates private education, ends ICETEX, eliminates State tests, lowers quality criteria, ends open and distance education, and politicizes higher education.
The reform seems more like a weak pamphlet in its technical component.
Petro’s reform makes higher education a fundamental right, the result is uncertain, could no student lose a semester? be expelled? What happens if you are not admitted to a university? What if there are no more seats? What if you don’t pay the tuition? Yes, thousands of guardianships await us that will complicate the life of the universities.
The government ends the functions of the National Council of Higher Education.
This council is an independent body that issues concepts for the ministry’s decision-making.
With the reform, the minister – not even the ministry as a whole – will determine by hand which universities can be opened, what educational programs they can offer and even what the financial capital necessary for their operation should be.
It can be a despotic path or the politicization of higher education in Colombia, without the benefits of concentrating eminently technical decisions in a single person being conceivable.
It is also worrying that the advisory institution of the Ministry of Education for public policies of basic and secondary education is the Pedagogical University.
There should be a comprehensive university advisory committee and not just one university that seems to be selected solely for ideological affinity with the government.
ICETEX is over. Its only function in the medium term will be to finance graduate programs abroad.
The founding desire of the government arises, to destroy to do something better.
Forget that ICETEX has benefited more than 5 million higher education students.
Many students today get the lowest rates on the market to go to private higher education. They will no longer have a choice.
The government eliminates state exams, and it will be possible to enter universities with some equivalent to a baccalaureate.
The Government proposes a grade 12 without presenting a justification.
While the world advances to cut, we to expand without even presenting your need or plan.
Preschool is schooled, leaving aside the existing policy of comprehensive development.
The project lowers the quality criteria to create new universities.
It gives the President extraordinary powers to create new universities for ethnic peoples without making their composition clear.
We will then go against what is happening in the world, where the search for excellence advances, where the highest standards of high-level research are sought.
The reform seeks places, regardless of quality, which will obviously generate a serious problem of unemployment and frustrated expectations.
The reform eliminates open and distance education programs in higher education. We will lose the great effort made by the National Public and Distance University, the largest in Colombia.
Serious questions arise about governance in universities with the creation of “Multi-stakeholder Assemblies”, which will have decision-making power.
It’s okay for students and estates to participate, but the decisions cannot be demagogic.
We could move towards minorities that would violate the rights of the entire educational community. That does intend to increase the cost of university welfare from 2% to 5%, without technical justification.
The government also links higher education programs with training programs for work and human development.
Perhaps they are doing it to reach the goal of 500,000 new higher education places in this four-year period, but that would be cheating on inflating the figures.
There is no seriousness in the idea that some are initial stages of others.
It does not solve the fact that today Higher Education institutions are -compulsorily- non-profit organizations, while many of those for training for Work and Human Development are for-profit.
The reform that aims to change everything, does not present modifications to the General System of Participations nor does it mention new financing mechanisms.