Negotiation to provide resources to the Special Fund for Higher Education (FEES) has never been easy. It is an extremely hard process because it has an unusual feature: all participants are right.
How could that happen? Universities for example, have reason to request more resources. Even if the country is already investing in higher education a percentage of GDP similar to the average of OECD countries, around 1.1% - Canada, Korea and the United States allocated a percentage of between 2.5 and 2.9, which should be a range aspiration for a country that claims to be successfully inserted in an economy and contemporary is founded on knowledge.
investment in public higher education is a prerequisite for development and should receive all necessary support to become the locomotive to pull the national dream of a better quality of life for the population.
But the Government is also correct. You can not accede to the request of universities. The country can only allocate the resources it produces, if the economy grows at 5% can not commit to ensuring the growth of university budgets by 11%, as we seek to universities. Unless of course we are willing to sacrifice investment in other fields.
This argument objective that originates in a tough fiscal realities, and not obscure interests that seek to eliminate public higher education to encourage private universities. To think that someone like Leonardo Garnier, who has become a lightning rod for attacks on government representation on the Liaison Committee, "it encourages a sense antiuniversitario can only be motivated by a supine ignorance of his career and thought, or by simple and plain malice. The truth is much more complex than a vacuum ad-hominem argument.
The situation becomes even more complicated when universities argue they could not accept less than they requested to have automatic growth their costs by 8% in real terms. And to be absolutely fair, many-not all, of that growth comes from salary bonuses have been awarded by courts. But the truth is that this is the behavior of spending on public universities, and this is a burden too heavy for the universities themselves and the country. Something must be done.
With a panorama like this, it is natural that the negotiation is particularly difficult. Perhaps the solution is not to discuss a funding formula for five years as has been the practice, but extend the deadline so that the options are greater.
For example, one may consider a growth scenario gradually the percentage of GDP devoted to higher education so that after 15 or 20 years to reach a 2.25% of GDP. This would allow several things. First, the timing of the fiscal resources required to ensure compliance with the agreement, including what now seems an inevitable and urgent tax reform.
Second, universities should make room for long-term planning to enable them to moderate-the way they see fit, the weight of those spending items that contribute to the automatic growth is clearly unsustainable. And third, and beware if this is not the most important, to reach such agreement, a true and unpublished state policy, it could become a model for other areas of national life, also in need of long-term actions.
course, to build something like this will require technical work hard and rigorous, which can not be subject to cyclical pressures in the budget cycle has already started. In this sense, universities and the government could agree on a budget for next year to ensure a 5% real growth, while projections put the GDP growth rate this year about 4% - and the management a loan of $ 150 million to offset the automatic growth rate covered and not halt altogether the expansion plans that universities have in place. This would give a period of one year, needed to build a long-winded solution.
With political will and commitment that should be of the possibility of reaching an historic agreement, it is possible that these strenuous negotiations today are, in 20 years, the object of curious investigation for those university students who have greater opportunities through a system of public higher education is the motor of development that the country needs.
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