La senda del perdedor: las políticas de cambio en la educación superior de México

Abstract

Abstract: Paths lead us down different ways. The decisions we make when choosing a path are responsible for getting us to where we had planned. Over the past three decades, higher education in Mexico has gone through several paths of academic and organizational reconfiguration and restructuring. These paths have been the product of exogenous and endogenous factors linked to policies and politics, which have led to the creation of groups and complex structures in universities. The path through which Mexican higher education now moves is restrictive, and demands changes and results in order to maintain state funding and support. This research consists of the analytical description of some processes of change in the structures of public universities following reforms introduced in the 1990s towards better quality and evaluation. From a perspective of institutional change and public policy analysis, I have taken international change policies as a guide to understand the patterns and processes observed in higher education in Mexico in recent years. I describe the processes of change towards quality, evaluation and diversification of higher education institutions and the paths taken by Mexican universities. In closing, I enumerate the determining factors in this series of changes that allow us to take a look at the current state of higher education in Mexico and possible guidelines for its analysis. Key words: institutional change, educational policies, reforms, trends in education, quality, evaluation.