From one end of Argentina to the other, university students and professors are the main focus of resistance to the adjustment of the Government of Javier Milei. Strikes, building occupations, marches and public classes occurred during the last week and are expected to continue in the coming week, demanding more funds for higher education and better salaries for teachers. Milei has maintained that he is not going to give in and that he will continue to prioritize the fiscal surplus. Meanwhile, the president has redoubled his attacks against public universities. After considering them centers of political and ideological indoctrination and accusing their authorities of misappropriating resources, among other things, he has said that they exclude the poorest social sectors. But official data refute this: more than 40% of public university students come from poor homes, a percentage that has doubled in less than 30 years.
“The best possible educational system is one where each Argentine pays for its services,” Milei said last year, still in the electoral campaign. Now, however, he assures that “a public, non-fee-paying university is not under discussion” (although he has also said that he is “the mole that destroys the State from within”). But, in defense of the cut in funds to universities, which as of September implied a real drop of 30.2% compared to last year, Milei repeats that in the universities there are “criminals” and “scroungers” who waste money. Last weekend, he added another argument: “In a country where the vast majority of children are poor and do not know how to read, write or perform a basic mathematical operation, the myth of free university becomes a subsidy for the poor.” towards the rich, whose children are the only ones who go to university,” Milei said at the Palacio Libertad. It was after he vetoed a law passed by Congress to update the university budget, the measure that triggered the current conflict with the academic community.
The ultra president’s claims collide with reality. In a country where 52.9% of the population is below the poverty line, official information from the Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec) indicates that the public university system, where two million people study, has a 42 .6% of poor students. The data corresponds to the semester October 2023 to March 2024 and was prepared, based on the Permanent Household Survey (EPH), by the economist Leopoldo Tornarolli, director of the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (National University of La Plata) .
Other studies confirm the data. A report from the Educational Policy Laboratory (National Hurlingham University), published last July, details that “participation [en el sistema universitario] of young people belonging to the 40% of the lowest-income households has doubled” in recent decades, “going from representing 18% of students in 1996 to 42% in 2023.” The same work, also based on official figures from Indec, indicates that the most pronounced growth is observed among young people from families that belong to the 20% with the lowest income: “The participation of this stratum increased from 7.3% in 1996 to 18.4% in 2023, a substantial increase of 152%.”
“A new world”
Sofía Servián, 26 years old, grew up and still lives in a marginal neighborhood in the Buenos Aires municipality of Quilmes, on the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires. “Most of the women in my family were or are domestic workers or housewives, they have not finished high school nor have they had a formal job. Most men my age spend their time in and out of detention,” he says. Despite a context that she defines as “quite complex,” she always had the idea of going to university. “I felt that a profession was going to give me independence. I wanted to do something more, not just repeat the pattern of being a housewife, having children,” she says. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), first to study History, then he switched to Anthropology. The trip to the university was long and expensive: four buses a day, two hours traveling there and two hours returning.
“At university I found a new world. With colleagues who had another economic level. I went into the library and everyone had their computer, I didn’t. “My classmates talked about vacations, about trips.” The first year, he remembers, was very difficult. “It was like hitting a wall. The educational level is another. The texts seemed very long to me and I didn’t understand them. Now I realize that I had no reading comprehension. I had to read with the dictionary at my side.”
At first, a scholarship from the State, from the Progresar program, was enough to pay for transportation and part of the notes. When he was looking for a job, he met sociologist Javier Auyero and began researching with him: “The work we did lasted 4 or 5 years and was paid, so I was able to continue with my degree.” The result of that work is the book How the poor survive. Sofía believes that “if I had had to do a job with other types of schedules, I would surely have had to leave school. “You want to study, but you also have to live day to day or help at home.” Now that he has finished studying and is preparing a thesis to graduate, he thinks that it is true that there are few poor people at the university, that there should be many more. “But the solution is not to cut the budget or salaries, or tariffs. If the university were not public and free, I could not have studied and today I would be cleaning houses.”
“Closeness and freeness”
According to researchers from the Educational Policy Laboratory, the growing presence in universities of students from disadvantaged sectors does not correlate with the impoverishment of society, but with the creation of new institutions in the last two decades, especially in the suburbs. Buenos Aires, the territory that concentrates the largest number of poor people in the country.
“When I was 18 I started university, but I had a long trip. I returned home at one in the morning and at 5:30 I got up to go to work. It was impossible, I couldn’t continue. I always worked 10 to 12 hours a day,” says Sebastián Lannutti. Only at the age of 36 was he able to study again, when the National University of Moreno opened, near his home: “Thanks to the proximity and the free availability, I was able to do it,” he says now, after graduating in Electronic Engineering and becoming the first university graduate of his family.
At the University of Moreno, which today has 15,000 students, “84% of incoming students belong to the lowest-income social sectors, well above the system average,” explains its rector, Hugo Andrade. “Among graduates, this is also reflected: although there is disparity, 70% of graduates come from the lowest-income sectors.”
A common characteristic of suburban universities is that among their students there is a majority of people who are the first generation of their families to achieve higher education. In the public system as a whole, 47% of new enrollees meet this condition, while in universities such as those located in Florencio Varela (Arturo Jauretche), José C. Paz and Merlo (del Oeste), three populous Buenos Aires districts, the percentage around 75%. This characteristic seems to refute another phrase uttered by Milei last week: “The university has stopped being a tool for social mobility and has become an obstacle to it,” he said. It also seems to be refuted by official data on the higher level of income that graduates achieve and the lower unemployment rate they suffer. “All our graduates manage to enter their profession, there is a very high demand for professionals in the region,” confirms Andrade.
Work and study
Rocío Villagra is an advanced student of the History Faculty at the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS), based in Los Polvorines. His mother finished primary school and his father finished high school. “I live 15 blocks from the university, I walk or bike. That helps me be able to sustain it,” he says. “With the scholarship for university entrants, with the first financial aid I received I was able to buy a jacket [un abrigo]because I didn’t have any.” He spent his entire career working. “At one time I worked at Capital [Ciudad de Buenos Aires]. I got up at five in the morning, I had many hours of travel and in the afternoon I arrived at the university exhausted. I was like this for four years, it cost me a lot,” he says. “And all of this is seen in my academic performance: my grades at that time were low, I got a 5 or 6, while later, when I managed to work closer to home, my grades rose to 8, 9 or 10.” Of the 40 subjects included in the History Faculty, nine need to be taken. He does not know how long it will take to approve them because this year, due to the critical economic situation in the country, he had to look for another job and currently works from Monday to Monday.
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