International Higher Education, Spring 2003

Venezuelan Higher Education: The Trend toward State Control

Venezuela has a well-developed higher education system that was characterized by expansion during the period from 1945 to the end of the century. This growth went from almost zero to what many believe is excess capacity, capturing most of the country’s education budget and leaving the basic and secondary levels of education underfunded. The system grew mostly in terms of traditional indicators like the number of institutions, students, and degree recipients. Missing was expansion in the area of science and technology. That is to say, the system was successful from the perspective of training institutions but not in the direction of sustaining the needs of knowledge-generating institutions. This low level of knowledge production explains why Venezuela has never been a regional pacesetter like Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico but has only been a decent follower, like Chile, Peru, or Colombia.

The government that came to power in 1998 brought along a new vision for higher education, although not new in innovative terms--quite the contrary. The system had been developing in the direction of decentralization. The new government, however, is trying to centralize the system along the lines of the only state-controlled system of higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean--that is, the system in Cuba, where the state rules the country’s institutions, including all of higher education.

An Overview
The Venezuelan higher education system follows a typical diversified pattern. Until 1953, the system was rather small and centralized. In that year the private sector, through the influence of American oil companies as well as in response to local demand, opened up with the creation of the first two private universities. In 1958 with the advent of democracy, after 10 years of military rule, the state higher education system expanded and developed, although not without encountering many problems. The guerrilla movement of the 1960s emerged from the large public universities. In the early 1970s the government intervened, implementing a number of university reforms.

The higher education system is divided into universities and nonuniversities. The latter include colegios and institutos universitarios, which are institutions with three-year academic programs. Universities are professional institutions and most of them offer graduate studies and currently account for almost all academic research conducted in the country. In fact, a limited number of them, the so-called autonomous universities and the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, carry out most of the science and technology research. Law, education, business administration, and the social sciences constitute the fields of most interest to students.

The private sector of Venezuelan higher education is quite strong and includes several types of institutions. While some are dedicated to three-year programs, others are regular universities with five-year degree programs. Although a number of institutions have ended up as simple business entities, others are quite committed to entering the academic sphere. However, so far no private institution in the country can compete with the major public universities in knowledge production. Private institutions strictly conform to the teaching model, with research, as stated, restricted to the large public institutions. The universities run by the state are divided into the old traditional universities created in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the universidades experimentales, created after 1958. The present government controls these latter universities through the appointment of new authorities. The government has not interfered in the rest of the system--the autonomous public universities and the private institutions.

Obstacles to Modernization
Many Venezuelans believe that the current government's intervention in the higher education system constitutes a setback, even though everyone agrees that the system needs an overhaul. Funds are being squandered because of the privileges granted to many professors. In fact, professors are paid according to the national job classification system. Many very clever academic entrepreneurs use their positions at universities to further their own personal interests. The new government has not touched these privileges and is unlikely ever to do so. To the contrary, it has increased salaries and privileges and is not exercising power to bring about academic change, appearing only interested in changes in the ideological arena. The government has created a Ministry of Higher Education. The top authorities at five of the experimental universities are appointed by the government, which is pressing to bring the whole higher education system under state control. However, the government has as yet said nothing about the private sector.

It must be noted that, in more than one way, President Hugo Chávez is a very peculiar leader, though perhaps he just belongs to the long line of Latin American autocrats. Even though he first tried to come to power in 1992 via a coup d´état, he returned in 1998 as a democratically elected leader. He then immediately broke with the political tradition of Venezuelan democracy, imposing his own vision. At the end of 2002, he was very much under attack. Old political forces have come back and the country is polarized. Unfortunately, the higher education system finds itself in the middle of this struggle. Venezuela might be an example of how political events can guide the course of higher learning. Chávez's government is anti-intellectual, antielite, antitechnology, anti-internationalization, and of course antiglobalization. By trying to change the ideological and political base of society while not getting involved in the technicalities of educational reform, the Chávez government may dismantle Venezuelan higher education without providing opportunities for the necessary modernization of the whole education system. If current trends continue, Venezuela's complex and diverse higher education system may come to resemble the centralized Cuban system.

The Immediate Future
Chávez, who sees himself as a kind of reincarnation of Simon Bolívar and clone of Fidel Castro, his political mentor, seems to have embraced the idea of being the leader of a world revolution against capitalism. In October 2002, Chávez declared his vision for Venezuelan education in a speech before the young members of the Federación Bolivariana de Estudiantes in a Caracas theater: "No classroom in Venezuela should be without a Bolivarian student brigade."

Many people would argue with the current government's approach to higher education. But time will tell if Chávez is right. In the meantime it will be quite interesting to watch the Venezuelan higher education system going backward, from decentralization to centralized control, from diversity to homogeneity, from political and ideological pluralism to the one-dimensional fundamentalism of an indoctrination-based approach to education and, in fact, to the whole social and political system.