World Savvy Monitor

The problems of primary and secondary education are amplified at the university level, leading to a situation in which Mexican workers are severely disadvantaged relative to their international competitors. 

• Mexican workers are generally not equipped to add value to the basic products they manufacture.  

• Assembly of parts alone is not terribly lucrative – the real money is made in industries where technology and innovation are added to products.    

• There is a vast disparity between the graduation rates of students enrolled in engineering programs in Mexico versus China and India.  

Another indicator used to measure the sophistication of a country’s graduates is the number of patents registered for new products.  As Latin American expert Andres Oppenheimer has noted, in Mexico only 4% of all patents registered in any given year are registered by Mexican citizens; the other 96% are in the name of multinational corporations which have developed the requisite technology elsewhere using non-Mexican talent.  He writes:

… Latin American countries can slash public spending, lower inflation, pay off foreign debt, reduce corruption, and improve the quality of political institutions – as the IMF demands – and continue to be poor as long as they fail to come up with more sophisticated products… (They) don’t spend enough on education, and what they do spend often goes to the wrong things, including paying teachers who don’t teach and subsidizing students who don’t need subsidy so they can pursue degrees they’ll never get in fields of study that their society doesn’t need.

In other countries where the overall quality of education is lagging, many talented students study abroad and return home to help improve the system.  Mexico sends relatively few students to study in other countries, and those that are sent often fail to return because of the lack of opportunities in Mexico.  

Next:  Inside Mexico:  Education:  Case Study of UNAM