Beyond the Rhetoric: Mexico’s Higher Education Reality with Alma Maldonado Maldonado

Sam Pufek: You are listening to the world of higher education podcast. Season three, episode 16.
Alex Usher: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. If you're a really faithful listener, you may remember that when the show was in beta and we were fooling around with formats and guests, we did an episode about Mexican higher education and its tribulations under the populist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador or AMLO for short.
Our guest that day was my friend Alma Maldonado Maldonado, an education researcher at CINVESTAV, which is the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute. That interview was so brilliant, we turned this podcast into a full time investigation of higher education developments in various countries around the world.
Today, Alma's back with us again to talk about how things have and have not changed in Mexico over the past two years. The big story there is that there's a new president in town. Last spring, Claudia Sheinbaum became the country's first ever woman president. One who happens to have a PhD in engineering with a specialty in energy and sustainability.
You'd think that might be an advantage to a higher education sector, but Scheinbaum comes from AMLO's Morena party and her instincts seem to be to continue her predecessor's tradition of attacking higher education as being a dissolute elite enterprise.
So what does this mean for Mexican higher education? Well, in general, it's not good. Alma takes us through the implications of Morena's supermajority in Congress, as well as its early attempts to put fiscal pressure on universities, and its continued fascination with the experimental and kind of shambolic Benito Juarez universities.
Spoiler alert, there are not a lot of silver linings in this story, either for public or private sector universities in Mexico. But enough from me, let's hand things over to Alma to explain.
Alma, thanks for being with us. When we talked, almost two years ago then president López Obrador had about a year to go in his mandate, year and a half, and he was basically at war with the university sector and the scientific community. How did his regime end with respect to higher education? Did anything change? Did things get better or worse in his final months? Any policy shifts we should know about?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Hi, Alex. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I think most of the things didn't change. Basically, things continue the same. And his rhetoric, his narrative against higher education institutions, against graduates from abroad, against, in general, UNAM, for instance, continued at the end of his period, unfortunately.
So there, there wasn't anything to make him change that rhetoric. Another thing is because he had the political pulse, right? I mean, he knew, his base was all with him. And why changing, right? Uh, uh, Something that is working. And on the contrary, the attacks to the university, the restriction of resources and all these things, unfortunately, they continue.
Alex Usher: And so nothing was resolved then, but then earlier this year, there were elections for the presidency and for both the chamber of deputies and the Senate. Did education play any role in this election or and higher education specifically? Was it an area where there were serious differences between parties?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Yeah, I haven't seen debates in Canada, presidential debates. But I have seen debates in the U. S., and I think it's kind of the same. Education is not there. You know, it's not important. Few mentions here and there about education, but in general, there were no part, like, key part of the campaigns. What happened in, during the elections in Mexico is that it was a kind of, a um, a theory of offering, scholarships. I will offer scholarships in secondary education. Yes, well, I will offer in scholarships in secondary, but also in primary education, and I will offer in preschool. So that was the main policy discussed, unfortunately, between the two main candidates. And that was the tone of the campaign, unfortunately.
And I think that's similar in other countries. So, yeah, I am not surprised about that, but it's really sad that when in a country like Mexico, when education can be that thing that help people or, you know, the steer that drives, social change. It is not there.
Alex Usher: Yeah. Well, so the victor in the election was Claudia Scheinbaum of the Morena party. So it's the same as the same party as AMLO, but, you know, at least superficially, she's got kind of a different image, right? She's a scientist. She has a degree from, an advanced degree from UNAM, a doctorate, I think. So does her arrival signal a different kind of relationship between the presidency and higher education? What do we know about her policies?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Well, it's complicated, you know, but on paper, she's better. That's, definitely. She got a PhD at UNAM. She was working as an academic. Probably the few cases where you have an academic as president. Not the first one, of course, but I mean, that's a factor. And then she has these, ideas or rhetoric pro science and pro higher education. Especially because she came from the student movement at UNAM in 19 She fought, together with uh, our friend Emanuel Ordorica, Carlos Simas, former husband, and Antonio Santos. She was not in the first circle, actually she was not a leader, but now, nowadays, they are rewriting this, the history, so they said, oh no, she was a leader.
But, so, she has all these things regarding, gratuity and free higher education, and higher education is a right, not a privilege. So, she had all this background. Now, when she came into power, which is, a few months ago, we have not really seen that change in terms of the most important thing, as you know, financing. Right? I mean, when you have uh, it's, it's clear, follow the money. So, in this case, she cut the budgets of UNAM and the main universities in the first draft of the budget, national budget. And later they said, oh no, it was a mistake. We didn't meant to cut the budget. Sorry, let's rearrange everything. Because imagine, she the person, you know, dedicated to defend free higher education, now she's not, really putting the money there.
Alex Usher: Right. Well, we'll come back to that, that issue in a second here. But I mean, how does she has a lot of power right now, maybe more power than AMLO had in the sense that she's got big majorities in both houses of, parliament, right? So she's got a big majority in the chamber of deputies big majority in the in the senate She can almost do whatever she wants, right? So so why would she, I guess why would she try something and then back up so quickly?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Well, because she's the president of higher education and science, right? So, reducing the budget as the first measure that would have been, you know, just wrong. But the important thing here is what you just said. She has the total control of the Congress, or the Senate, and she is managing the main uh, reforms in the country re regarding the judicial, uh, system. And she's just changing a lot of laws right now. So again, education is not on the map, but also because López Obrador changed the constitution, the third article, which is related to education. So why she would do it right now?
Alex Usher: We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
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Alex Usher: And we're back.
So Alma let's let's go back to that issue about what the president proposed in the budget. I guess last month. It included so the proposed budget was a cut of 10, billion pesos. That's about 500, million dollars U. S. to the higher education budget with half of it falling directly on UNAM was my understanding. And so there was an outcry. She's backpedal a little bit like, do we know how this is going to end up? Do we have a sense of where this is of what the final cut is going to be, or are they going to be held whole for the next year?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Yeah, they decided to reorganize the budget. Now they are cutting to other places. Unfortunately, for instance, they are cutting to initial education or, you know. cutting other areas, not only in the education, but also in other parts. The senate, I think they cut the senate budget. They are fighting over that. Eh, but at least what they said is, well, okay, now we are, the same, the same money, we said we were going to continue with that. The same budget last year that was assigned. But with a little bit of um, a small percentage covering, inflation, right? So, but it's really nothing. If you compare because, the experts, some experts consider inflation was 5%. And they are just adding three point something.
Alex Usher: Right.
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: So at the end, it's going to be less money. That's what matters. Less money to spend, right? Less money for infrastructure or materials or whatever. So yeah, universities are somehow better, but yeah, that was a big issue a couple of weeks ago because they were really this is a major contradiction that we have now this president and she is putting us in such a bad position in terms of our budget.
Alex Usher: What do you think was the idea behind putting so much of the cut on UNAM? I mean, is it because there are people in the government who specifically dislike the big research university? Like, why would that have been any, why would anyone have thought that was a good idea?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Yeah, that goes to speculations, right? I mean, people say, some people say, yes, that was a punishment, no, to UNAM and the punishment because UNAM has preserved its independence in topics such as the judiciary reform, or in topics like that. So UNAM has maintained a critical position, and Morena and Claudia are mad at UNAM.
And that could be the real thing is that the first thing Lopez Obrador did when he arrived into power six years ago was to modify the, as I mentioned it, the third article of the constitution about education, and he erased the autonomy of universities, all of them. And they said, oh, it was a mistake. Sorry, that was not our intention. So if you add, I have friends who have written about the several mistakes, you know, there are so many mistakes and you wonder, right?
Alex Usher: So going back to AMLO again, I mean, one of the things that was part of his, legacy, I guess, was this plan to increase the number of students in the system by about one and a half million, if I recall correctly, and yet at the same time, he was underfunding institutions. So how did that end up by the end of his term? Did he reach that 1. 5 million student goal? You know, and how did the funding crisis you know, the funding, the underfunding play into the final result.
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Yeah, right now, Alex, we are in about 44 percent of coverage of enrollment, right, in higher education. That's very low if you compare to other Latin American countries, by the way. We always keep saying that. But also he proposed to reach 50 percent, López Obrador, right? So, But he couldn't. He was, he fell short.
And then we had now Claudia Sheinbaum who says she wants to get to the 55%, which is I don't think is realistic. I think, again, the tradition in Mexico is that you keep pushing 5%, no matter what, no matter if the previous government didn't get. You keep pushing, 5%, 5%, so I guess that's the way they do the um, governmental plans here. But for that, you need about 1, 200, 000 students for the 55%, which is impossible, Alex, with the system the way it is now. So. Again, we have these big goals for the enrollment, but really the, when you see the data, when you see where they are opening spaces, again, the spaces are not going to, to the places where students want to go. So there is a clear contradiction between the goal and what they are planning to do in this case.
Alex Usher: Right. And so part of the AMLO strategy had to do with the so called universities of wellbeing, the universities Benito Juarez and which were a lot of small access oriented, that was the idea, institutions in other part in, you know, remote parts of the country, and that idea seems to be spreading.
Right? So Gustavo Petro in Colombia has has announced a very similar kind of project. But from our conversation 2 years ago, you were saying uh, yeah there's not much behind those plans, right? There's sort of Potemkin institutions. What's the situation in the Benito Juarez universities now? Is Sheinbaum likely to continue this line of policy or no,
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Yes, of course, she's not only, you know, continuing with this project, which again, as I mentioned it then and continuing now, it's very obscure because we don't have the data. We don't know who go there, who teach there, what they learn. I have currently a student who is doing his master's degree dissertation on them and he cannot get in. Right? For um, simple research. So, Claudia has decided to continue with Universities of Well Being. She, in a recent plan she presented the other day, she said, I want to open 50 more. So we really don't know what is happening with the 140, again, the number is not very clear. Eh, you see now and then, eh, a lot of protests when the person in charge goes to these universities, people are protesting because they don't receive the degrees, because they have complaints, because they don't like what they are getting.
But the whole plan is to establish 50, and I won't be surprised at all that Colombia or other countries friendly countries to Morena and Claudia, would adopt the idea. But yeah, the problem is that they are offering these places. The whole idea is that they can receive about 40, 000 new So we got 110, 000, a total enrollment for the whole 6 years. So that language seems crazy.
Alex Usher: Interesting. Okay. So we've been talking mainly about what's going on in the public sector. What about the private sector? I mean, Mexico has some pretty impressive, private institutions. I'm thinking particularly of Tecnologico de Monterrey you know, or maybe institutions like Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara. How does disarray in the public sector affect them? Does it make them stronger? Does it give them access to a bigger market or no?
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: I think they are struggling. Again, we need to distinguish between the high prestige institutions and the low prestige or the So, we have so many different types, but let's talk about the high prestige institutions first. They are uh, struggling financially because some of the scholarships that they receive, for instance for the, for their, eh, graduate programs, having eliminated with this rhetoric that you only provide scholarships to the public sector, not to the private.
So they used to have these, eh, very good, you know, very decent graduate programs where many students obtain a, a scholarship from CONACYT. The former, well now it's not the name, but anyway, CONACYT, the.
Alex Usher: the science,
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: National Science Technology Council. So, now they are, I think they have, they are creative or they have to be more creative in terms of resources.
On the other hand, you have these other institutions, low prestige some of them, as bad as the universities, Universidades del Bienestar, Benito Juarez with lack of quality. But the government let them be, because, it solves one problem, right, which is demand. And it solves the problem that I want my kid to go to college, and this university says that it's a college, so I make an effort to pay that in order to get a degree. You know, so I, I think we are in, in between in these two, extremes. Then in the middle you have these other institutions that are also, more decent in terms of the quality they provide. But still the problem is who, who is making sure about the quality of these institutions. And that's a problem since before and now.
Alex Usher: I mean, that's a pretty classic access versus quality trade off that we see in a lot of countries, right? That's not just Mexico.
Yeah. So, okay. We've been, we've had a lot of doom and gloom here, Alma. I got to ask you one question which is what bright spots do you think there might be in 2025? What's the best news story you think might come from the sector this year?

Alma Maldonado Maldonado: For Mexico?.
Alex Usher: Yeah.
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Wow. Um, I wish we can have more or I can have more ideas, right? Because the other thing, and I mean that, has to do with you as well, is North America, right? And Trump what this is going to mean for a country like Mexico. So I don't see good news in the horizon. I see bad news, I see problems, and I see, you know, I see with a lot of sadness the fact that Mexico didn't took advantage of doing more things with the U. S. while Biden was in power, you know, agreements and all these things that we have done in the past in North America. So I, I don't see um, unfortunately very good news here.
Although I guess, you know, in the middle of all these problems, again, you have to be creative and you have to, you know, make sure you do the best with the, in the middle of the scarcity of funds and all these things, but yeah, I am worried about what is going to happen once Trump gets in power regarding Mexico, migrants, the migrants that might stay here.
Maybe we prepare a program, you know, to receive some migrants with higher education degrees and make sure we do better this time than when the Dreamers situation happened. But who knows? You know, I am not very confident, unfortunately, in what the government is going to do and the way the government is going to be prepared for this situation.
Alex Usher: Yeah. Well, that's a good reminder that international affairs do intrude on higher education affairs sometimes. Alma, thanks so much for being with us.
Alma Maldonado Maldonado: Thank you very much Alex.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany McLennan and Samantha Pufek, and of course you are readers, watchers and listeners for joining. If you have any questions or comments about today's podcast, do get in touch with us at podcast at higher ed strategy. com. Please join us and sign up to our YouTube page. Never miss an episode of the World of Higher Education podcast. Join us next week when our guest will be Michael Shattuck. He's visiting professor at the University College of London's Institute of Education and honorary research professor at Oxford University, and he's going to be joining us to talk about governance in European universities. Bye for now.