Mexico and the World
Vol. 5, No 1 (Winter 2000)
http://www.profmex.org/mexicoandtheworld/volume5/1winter00/university_graduates.html

University Graduates and Economic Development in Mexico Since the 1940s:

Implications for Global Change   David E. Lorey, Ph.D. Program Officer for U.S.Latin American Affairs William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Changing Demand for University Graduates in Mexico Since 1940
The Underlying Problem:  Mexico’s Economic Development after 1940 
The University Response to Declining Opportunity
Conclusions 
Endnotes
 

Introduction 

     This paper takes the form of a historical review of the political economy of Mexican higher education since the 1940s with two main focuses:   

1.  the relationship between university graduates and jobs;  and  

2.  the evolution of higher education policy in a period during which a mismatch between graduates and jobs became pronounced.   

     In developing both focuses I provide some concrete information on the Mexican experience drawn from my research, specifically on aspects of the Mexican case that I think have broad significance in the context of globalization.  I hope that my analysis of these issues will prove useful to others who are setting their sights on global factors and contexts in higher education.   

      The paper focuses on economic issues related to university education in Mexico.  The economic context, more precisely the context of the job-market for university graduates, is one that is increasingly perceived, and I believe correctly, as of global significance.  The parochialism that has often kept world universities and higher education policymakers isolated—to their considerable disadvantage—is now being swept away on the global tide of free (or freer) trade, the ongoing communications revolutions, and the spread to the “first world” of “third world” economic and social problems.  The fact that unemployment among university graduates (and employment at lower than attained skill levels) appears to be growing in the developed industrial countries means that much can be learned there from the experiences of Mexico, which has faced this problem for two or three decades now. 
  

The Changing Demand for University Graduates in Mexico Since 1940 

     The Mexican university system has been accused by many observers of being unable to educate the professionals that the Mexican economy needs—both in specific fields and at different levels of expertise. The common perception has been that Mexican universities produce too many graduates of “traditional” fields (too many lawyers and not enough engi-neers and scientists) and too few graduates of high quality.   

    My research suggests that the logic of this standard view is flawed.  Contrary to the generally accepted wisdom, in fact, the equation works the other way around:  the Mexican economy has been unable to provide enough professional level jobs for university graduates since at least the late 1950s.¹  Because it cannot shape the job market for professionals, the university system has had to adapt itself to a historical reality of increasingly scarce opportunities for graduates in relative terms.  

     I originally identified this trend by examining the relationship between employed professionals and technicians over time, and by then comparing these data to series on university graduates.²  The relationship between professionals and technicians is of primary importance because the ratio between the two groups, and its evolution over time, reveals a great deal about the nature of economic development in Mexico since 1929. The history of the developed economies is characterized in general by the creation of large numbers of positions at the professional level in both absolute and relative terms.³  

     While both professionals and technicians have constituted an ever increasing part of Mexico's economically active population since 1950 (as indicated in the data discussed above), census data for 1950, 1980, and 1990 reveal that the two levels have not grown at the same rate.  My data indicate that Mexican economic development has created a differentially greater demand for technicians compared to professionals over time.  While positions for professionals grew 417.8 percent between 1950 and 1980, those for technicians grew 1,055.3 percent, annual rates of 5.6 and 8.5 percent. For the period from 1950 to 1990 the rates were 5.4 and 7.4 percent.⁴   

     One of the most convincing pieces of circumstantial evidence of a growing differential in demand for professionals and technicians is provided by studies of industrial employment and wage differentials between employed professionals and technicians.  Wages constitute the price of professional services, and thus reveal relative scarcity and demand.  Between 1940 and 1976, white-collar occupational earnings declined relative to blue-collar occupational earnings—a decline that was particularly rapid after the early 1960s.⁵  This apparent trend reflects two interrelated phenomena: a declining relative demand for professionals and an increasing supply of university graduates.   The result was that many university graduates worked as technicians.  A Banco de México study showed that as early as 1961 39 percent of technicians were university educated.⁶    

     We can conclude that the Mexican economy developed in a way that limited job creation at a very important level of the occupational ladder. And the absorption of professionals is, if anything, overestimated in the census data because the data reflect to some extent the sup-ply of professionals as well as demand.⁷  That is, because the census is based on informants' responses, some university graduates are probably classified by census workers as professionals even though they are not working at the professional level. 

     It is informative to compare the rates of growth for employment positions for professionals and technicians in the census data with the rates of graduation of professionals at Mexican universities.  Between 1950 and 1960, the number of degrees granted in all professional fields grew 75.1 percent; between 1960 and 1970, the number of degrees granted grew 232.1 percent. Between 1970 and 1980 the number of egresados grew 266.5 percent, while degrees registered grew 149.1 percent.⁸  The rate slowed markedly in the crisis years of the 1980s: the number of egresados grew 72.6 percent between 1980 and 1990. 

     The growth rate of degrees granted was matched fairly closely by the growth rate of professionals until 1960. Between 1950 and 1980 the annual growth rate of professional EAP was 5.6 percent compared to 5.8 percent for degrees granted between 1950 and 1960. Between 1960 and 1970, however, the number of degrees granted grew at an annual rate of 12.4 percent.  The annual rate of growth of degrees granted for the entire period from 1950 to 1970 was 9.0 percent.  New data on degrees granted for 1990 yield an implicit growth rate of 8.8 percent for the period from 1950 to 1990. 

     Clearly, by the 1960s, the universities were producing graduates at a rate well above the rate of job creation for professionals in the Mexican economy.  The number of degrees registered grew at an annual rate of 11.0 percent between 1971 and 1980, very close to the growth experienced by degrees granted in the 1960s.⁹  The growth rate of egresados, in contrast, was significantly higher than that of either degrees granted or degrees registered and thus seems to reflect the higher growth of positions for technicians. While the number of positions for technicians in EAP grew at an annual rate of 8.5 percent between 1950 and 1980 and 7.4 percent between 1950 and 1990, egresados grew at an average annual rate of 13.9 percent between 1970 and 1980 (5.6 between 1980 and 1990).  

     The data thus indicate that employment for technicians grew much more rapidly than for professionals after 1950. The growth rates of technicians and professionals in EAP were mirrored in the growth rates of egresados and degrees granted and registered. It seems clear that the major difference between university egresados and university degree recipients in the job market is that egresados are more likely than graduates with degrees to be employed at the technician level.  In 1990 almost 40 percent of persons with four years or more of university education held nonprofessional jobs; in agronomy, more than half worked at the technician level or below.  Thirty-six percent of persons with four years of university education made less than three minimum salaries (in the 1980s the minimum salary became the official yardstick for income).¹⁰  Large numbers of university graduates, even the best trained students from the most highly regarded institutions, found themselves unemployed.¹¹   

     While it is difficult to develop data on absolute changes in the number of professional positions created by economic growth in Mexico, Figure 1 presents my calculations of job creation and university preparation of professionals and technicians. In the 30 year period from 1950 to 1980 an estimated 622,257 egresados left Mexican universities to fill 440,000 new jobs for professionals; between 1980 and 1990, 1,305,294 egresados were produced for 311,452 new professional level jobs. By the 1960s the demand for professionals was met and exceeded and by the end of the 1980s there were almost a million egresados who had received their degrees in the decade and for whom no professional jobs were available.  Clearly, a major disparity has developed in absolute as well as relative terms.¹²  
 
 

Figure 1  Comparison of Professional Job Creation and  University Egresados, 1950-90     Cumulative University Positions 

Period	Professionals	Egresados
1950-60	70,000	50,000
1960-70	100,000	120,000
1970-80	270,000	452,257
1980-90	311,452	1,305,294

Source: Lorey, Rise of the Professions, Table 31 

     Data on professionals and technicians point to four general conclusions. First, the ability of the Mexican economy to absorb university graduates at the professional level has not grown as fast as the number of university students entering professional courses of study.  Second, the demand for technicians has grown at a much faster rate than that for professionals.  Third, the universities have produced both professionals and technicians at rates significantly greater than the rate of job creation.  Fourth, the mismatch between demand and output and the greater demand for technicians than for professionals appear to have been particularly marked after the late 1950s, toward the end of Mexico’s postwar “baby boom,” which lasted from roughly 1945 to 1955.  
  

The Underlying Problem:  Mexico’s Economic Development after 1940 

     Until the late 1950s, the expanding industrial and commercial sectors, and the growing state apparatus, absorbed the bulk of the universities' production of professionals relatively easily. The growing state tended to stimulate employment in certain fields, particularly social fields such as teaching, health, and law, while the private sector expressed a strong demand for economic fields such as engineering, accounting, and business administration. 

     The perception of observers in the late 1950s that there was a shortage of engineers, business managers, highly skilled workers, and scientists was generally correct.¹³  Demand for engineers and business managers was especially acute as government policy focused economic development efforts on industrialization and the modernization of commercial networks. The fact that many persons working at the techni-cian and lower occupational levels were promoted to professional positions implies a vacuum at the professional level during this period.¹⁴  After the late 1950s, however, there was a decline in the ability of the economy to produce jobs for professionals at the rate that students had been leaving the universities.   

     The post-1950 trend of increasingly flagging demand for professionals as compared to technicians is related to four characteristics of the historical development of the Mexican economy that shaped professional employment in the public and private sectors.  These four factors, and others of less importance, worked in concert to influence major changes in the university system's functioning after the late 1950s. 

     First, employment opportunities for professionals were restricted by historically high levels of protection of Mexican industry.  Protection of manufacturing concerns had its roots in the Porfiriato; protection under the Institutionalized Revolution began in earnest in the late 1930s and increased rapidly and steadily until the mid 1980s.  Mexican industries received a wide range of protective covers, particularly overvalued exchange rates from the early 1940s through 1954, quantitative control of imports thereafter, and generous tax breaks and implicit subsidies throughout.  The employment creating effects of the dynamic economic growth after 1940, growth which was engendered by such protective policies, were much diminished by the 1970s, a fact reflected in Echeverría's stopgap attempts to slow decreasing employment at the professional level. 

     Protection from domestic and international competition allowed Mexican industry to produce goods with outmoded equipment, minimal investment for research and development, and limited innovation: protection limited the need for new technology and associated professional knowledge.¹⁵  Limited spending for research and development restricted job creation in a key area of professional employment.  The use of outmoded technology, and the reliance for economic growth during the 1940s and 1950s on increased utilization of installed capacity idle up to the late 1930s, greatly reduced both the number of professionals needed by the economy and the level of professional training at the universities.  Most of the technology used in industrial plants in the 1980s continued to be obsolete or lag behind state-of-the-art innovations.¹⁶  

     A second factor that restricted employment opportunities for professionals was the importation of capital goods and thus technology for industrial expansion.  Importation of professional expertise embodied in foreign-made machines constricted employment opportunities for Mexican professionals.  Technology in industry is not an independent, abstract body of knowledge held by professionals but rather a function of machines and their development. Capital goods industries have a much greater relative need for professional level employees than other manufacturing firms. 
  
     The reliance of Mexican industry on imported capital goods meant historically that the primary stimulus to professional education took place in the countries that produced advanced capital goods for domestic use and for export. Because a capital goods industry developed haltingly in Mexico, it should be no surprise that Mexican universities have not educated the large numbers of graduate level experts in science and technology associated with advanced, competitive economies.  They have not been needed by the Mexican productive apparatus.¹⁷   

     A third factor which affected the employment of professionals and the growth of university enrollments after the late 1950s was the pattern of government employment of university graduates.  Public-sector employment of professionals has always shaped general demand for university graduates and university training in Mexico.  Much of the increase in Mexico's professional and technician EAP after the late 1930s occurred in state or para-state agencies and firms, the number of which mushroomed after the 1950s. The growth of public-sector hiring of profes-sionals reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s; public-sector employment exploded by 82 percent between 1975 and 1983. By 1983, public-sector employees accounted for 20.4 percent of all Mexican employees.¹⁸  Over time, the government grew into the largest employer of university graduates and egresados.  

     In both centralized and decentralized sectors, however, the government acted after the late 1950s as a sponge for absorbing professionals produced by the universities but not needed in the private sector, and perhaps not really needed in the public sector.  Many state industries and agencies had limited real needs for the skills of highly trained professionals.  Increasing state employment produced the illusion of rapidly growing professional cadres, when, in fact, the level of skills really needed was significantly lower than appearances suggested.  The rapid expansion of the public sector since the 1930s was driven in large part by the need to create jobs for professionals from middle class backgrounds.  Public-sector employment on these terms sent incorrect signals about the real demand for some professional skills in Mexico. 

     At the same time, government outlays for health and education were not sufficient to provide employment for all the teachers, doctors, and nurses leaving universities.  Public expenditure on social welfare programs in general lagged far behind economic investment and administrative expenditures.  Not until the late 1950s did the proportion of federal expenditure devoted to social programs regain levels of the 1930s.¹⁹  By that time, a significant backlog of professionals in social fields had been created.  

     Fourth, professional employment was restricted by trends in the Mexican economy related to the opening of Mexico to global markets.  The Mexican economy has, since at least the mid 1980s, seen impressive growth in its commercial sector as Mexico joined GATT (1986), unilaterally lowered tariffs, and initiated freer trade with the United States and Canada.  The commercialization of goods and services, particularly imported products, has apparently far outpaced the domestic production of similar goods.  This development has for the most part created job opportunities limited to “low-tech” positions in marketing, management, and customer service.  Work in commercializing of goods rarely requires university level training.  As NAFTA phases in over the next decade, this employment trend is likely to continue. 

     Signals on the demand for university graduates were further complicated by “positional” issues.  Social demand for higher education grew in part because, as the supply of professional jobs tightened relative to the number of graduating students, those students who were able to took additional “doses” of education or sought places at private universities.  As a consequence of the competition for social status, demand grew even when the corresponding economic demand stagnated or contracted.²⁰  As a result of this dynamic, demand for university opportunities expanded particularly rapidly in areas of study that provided students with a more flexible suite of skills than those associated with traditional professional fields:  communications, industrial engineering, and, above all, business administration. 

     The absorption of large numbers of professionals into the workplace from the late 1930s through the 1950s did not signal the beginning of indefinitely expanding employment opportunities for professionals.  Because there was little change in the nature of the machinery used and little increase in expenditure for research and development, the employment of professionals underwent no dramatic qualitative change.²¹   

     It is thus the historical pattern of economic development that has limited demand for professionals, not any absolute lack of professionals, or relative lack of professionals in specific fields, that has held back economic development.²²  Limited real demand for professionals reflects the uncompetitive, inefficient nature of Mexican industry and its reliance on the Mexican government for protection and on foreign capital goods producers for technological innovation.²³  Although the industrial and service sectors of Mexico's economy did expand, that expansion was characterized by the continuation of rather traditional needs for professional skills. 

     While the proportion of professional and technician labor increased in the Mexican economy between 1950 and 1980, this general trend obscures the differential growth of technicians within the group.  While GDP grew rapidly during the 1960s (7.0 percent per year) and 1970s (6.6 percent a year), employment for professionals did not increase at a similar rate.  Optimistic observers of the “Mexican Miracle” did not foresee the economic, social, and political stresses that have arisen from this aspect of Mexico's economic development.  And in looking back, analysts inaccurately attributed these stresses to the internal faults of the university system rather than to the pattern of Mexico's economic development. 
  

The University Response to Declining Opportunity 

     The university system’s most significant response to changing demands for professionals and technicians was to produce a small number of graduates to fill the need for the most highly qualified professionals and a much larger number of egresados to fill the need for technicians.  The government's emphasis on increasing enrollment capacities at public universities in the 1940s and 1950s thus paid off in an ironic way: the university system assumed the twin roles of training professionals and technicians.  

     The economy's evolving demand also affected the quality of professional education and the institutional concentration of the university system.  A “system” of public and private universities evolved after the 1940s as the two types of institutions came to feed different labor markets, producing egresados and graduates of different qualities.  By producing very different sorts of graduates, public and private universities acted together in responding to the economy's changed demand for university trained professionals.  

     A secular leveling off of quality at Mexican universities was one important result of the changing demand of the economy.²⁴  Although Mexican higher education has not experienced a distinct “crisis” in quality, quality did decline gradually from historic highs in the 1940s beginning in the late 1950s and then improved significantly in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  It cannot be concluded that growth in student enrollment caused low quality education at Mexican public universities, as is often asserted. The overcrowding of campuses, which is often blamed for declines in quality, is a matter of financial support and physical plant design in Mexico, not a sign of a student population which is “too large” in any objective sense.²⁵  

     I suggest that quality settled roughly at the level of professional and technician level skills demanded by Mexican employers in the public and private sectors.  As the demand for technicians progressively outpaced demand for professionals, the rate of improvement in per student expenditure, fulltime teaching staff, and other quality indicators declined at the same time that university students successfully placed significant downward pressure on admission and degree requirements.  This pressure on quality did not necessarily hold true terms of knowledge acquired, at least at first—one study suggests that in many fields, university graduates knew more than they needed to.²⁶   

     Within the general trends of changes in quality, important differences exist between public and private universities, with private institutions attaining a significantly higher level of quality before the 1980s.²⁷  These differences were determined primarily by two main factors: (1) a demand of private sector and certain public sector employers for the highest quality professionals that could not be met by the public university system alone, and (2) the tighter private sector market for professionals compared to that for technicians.  An apparent closing of the quality gap between public and private universities in the 1980s was most likely due to the faculty hiring boom in public universities during the decade; it is not clear what effect this boom had on overall quality.²⁸  Overall, it seems clear that public and private universities came to be driven by different labor markets but functioned efficiently together to meet the economy's needs, allocating professionals and technicians among employment positions.  

     The deconcentration of the university system was rapid in the period after the late 1950s. (I use the term “deconcentration,” rather than “decentralization,” to describe the declining importance of the historically largest and oldest institutions as opposed to trends in geographical location or financial status of universities.)  After the late 1950s, the preeminence of UNAM and IPN, the two public university giants which had been preeminent until 1938 and were closely associated with government plans for development, was greatly eroded.  The trend away from the largest and oldest institutions was the case in the realm of both public and private universities. Additionally, there was a noticeable shift at the end of the 1950s away from public institutions and toward private universities and regional public universities.²⁹  

     Both variations in quality after the 1950s and the deconcentration of the Mexican university system coincided with the shift in the economy's demand for professionals and technicians toward a relatively greater demand for technicians.  The pattern of quality differences and the trend toward deconcentration indicate that public and private universities played different but complementary roles in responding to economic changes.  Public universities served produced large numbers of egresados who never received the degree and probably worked primarily as technicians.  In doing so, they partially relieved the tremendous pressure of growing enrollments.  Private universities concentrated their resources on producing high quality graduates for top-level professional jobs. 

     After the 1950s, demand for social mobility came into ever greater conflict with the reality of Mexico's historical economic development.  As the process of economic development created a progressively smaller relative number of jobs at the professional level, the university's ability to provide widespread social mobility was increasingly limited.  Large and increasing numbers of university graduates had to find work not as professionals but as technicians.³⁰  As shown above in Figure 1, in the 1980s the number of university graduates exceeded the number of positions for professionals by a factor of more than three.  

     As the possibility of social mobility decreased, public universities opened their doors to students from working class backgrounds, evolving to meet the challenge of changing demand for professionals.³¹  After the late 1950s, the public university system adopted the function of providing social status rather than social mobility to many university students.  It is this opening of doors to university entrants and the function of providing social status that have determined the historical inability of the public university to keep up with the quality demands of the economy.  The government subsidy to the public university system has been spent on supporting large entering classes and providing the maximum number of university places for the first few years of university education.   

     The effect of the “open-door” university policy in Mexico, it has been suggested, has been to prepare students, not for professional careers, but for un or underemployment.  It does this by providing an environment in which young people’s aspirations and expectations for certain levels of employment, consumption, and well-being are gradually brought into line with available opportunities.  This outcome serves a government that, because it cannot provide good jobs to all job entrants, is principally concerned with social control.³²  One might add that the inefficiency attributed to the university system by some observers only exists if the purpose of universities in Mexico is assumed to be the education of professionals; the university system may be very efficient at keeping the lid on vocal and articulate dissatisfaction. 

     Ironically, even decades of open-door policies and rapidly increasing enrollments at public universities did not yield more than modest coverage of college-age Mexicans.   In the mid1980s about 15 percent of the population between 18 and 24 years of age was enrolled in post-secondary programs.  And this percentage tended still to be primarily from the Mexican middle and lower middle classes.³³  These data indicate the fairly sluggish nature and limited peak of the rise of the professions in Mexico. 

     In the early 1990s an attempt was made to redirect some of the continuing pressure on public universities for places by establishing “technological universities.”  These institutions were designed, according to most analysts, to relieve pressure by providing opportunities for students from less advantaged social sectors and to add prestige to technical education.  They also responded to the reality that, in its new global position, Mexico would continue to need many more technicians than university trained professionals.³⁴   

The adaptation of providing social status in place of significant upward social mobility, as a hedge against decreasing chances of professional ascension, bolstered rhetorical promises of social improvement by way of university education.  Different roles for public and private universities—with public and private universities linked to different labor markets—proved functionally useful in Mexico because of the importance of maintaining the social role of the public universities.  The university system’s response was in line with its responsibilities under the implicit political pact of 1929.  Its response was also consistent with the reality of changing opportunities for professional level university graduates. 

Conclusions 

     The principal reason I see for expanding what has been to date a parochial view of higher education policymaking is that the fundamental economic and social stresses that have produced the malaise of Mexican higher education are shared by many other countries in the world.³⁵  My research suggests a complex relationship between the Mexican university system and the process of economic development in the period since the 1940s.   

      In the Mexican case, the economy exerted a greater relative demand for technicians than for professionals; I suggest that this is an evolution that may well be characteristic of other countries.  In response to this shift, Mexican universities produced ever larger numbers of egresados, a significant percentage of whom would not continue on to the degree stage but would fill technician level job openings.  What this meant in the Mexican case was that the economy could not provide upward mobility into professional strata as fast as university enrollment grew after the late 1950s.   

      These changes produced a series of pressures on national level policymakers, university administrators, and higher education planners.  The Mexican university system developed increasingly distinct public and private components in order to allocate ever larger numbers of aspirants between available professional and technician positions. Public universities increasingly performed the function of providing social status to rapidly growing entering classes, keeping alive the goal of widespread mobility into the middle class. 

      At the heart of the Mexican dilemma—and possibly at the heart of the “crises” in many other university systems—is the issue of the social mobility provided by economic development in the years following the Second World War.  Mexicans from many different walks of life were assured by leaders that university education would lead to a middle class life.  Pablo González Casanova, a sociologist and onetime rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), gave voice to the hopes of millions when he proclaimed that: “In today's Mexico which is being industrialized and urbanized there is permanent social mobility.  The peasants of yesterday are today's workers, and the workers' children can be professionals.”³⁶  Because this hope was so widely shared, access to university education came to play a central role in maintaining the legitimacy of Mexico’s post-revolutionary order. 

      The ideal of a professional society in which most people would be ranked by occupational qualifications was important in post-revolutionary Mexico because it promised social mobility in a country characterized by widespread poverty.  The commitment of leaders to this ideal produced some of the most problematic higher education and public employment policies of the postwar years.  For professional society proved an elusive goal.  Sluggish rates of real social mobility, expressed in the present case as declining opportunities for university graduates, yielded unexpected social change, new political realignments, as well as broad cultural responses.  Rather than creating an ever broadening professional sector, Mexico instead inherited a large group of young people who felt that they had been betrayed—by the university, by “the system,” by the Revolution.  The impact of these changes was particularly problematic among the middle classes, many members of which were “lost” as supporters of the government, according to at least one observer.³⁷  

      The disparity between the number of persons desiring to enroll at universities and the number of university places has grown since the 1970s and the situation remains grave.  UNAM, for example, could only make room for half of all applicants by the late 1980s.  In 1995 students who had been rejected at the UNAM occupied the rectoría for eight days.  In an unprecedented split in the student body, rejected students and their support were critical of the “automatic pass” system by which preparatory students from affiliated high schools enter the UNAM regardless of test scores.  Of the 33,000 available spots for entering students, 23,000 went automatically to graduates of incorporated preparatory schools, who frequently also had lower grades than other applicants.  The cumulative number of rejected applicants grew steadily as the economic crisis of 1994-1995 made private education unattainable for many students from middle class families.³⁸  In 1996, only 6.4 percent of applicants (a total of 4,800) from outside UNAM’s affiliated high schools were admitted.³⁹    

     The contraction of the Mexican economy in the 1980s left its mark on employment of university graduates:  at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Monterrey, for example, the percentage of egresados employed one year after leaving the university fell from 76.2 percent in 1980–81 to 49.1 percent in 1986–87.⁴⁰  The drastic reduction of government jobs for professionals after the economic crisis of 1982 meant that pressures against the system would continue to build.   

     With the dramatic restructuring of the Mexican economy during the 1980s and 1990s, and particularly the increased foreign investment pursued by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, many professionals were laid off and replaced by new, largely imported, capital intensive technologies.  In privatizing parastatal enterprises, the government planned to transfer a third of the work force to the private sector, which in turn would reduce superfluous labor.⁴¹   Mexico's entrance into the GATT in 1985, NAFTA in 1993, and the continuing emphasis on maquila and other assembly operations for export did little to stimulate professional opportunities.  While in the long term professional employment may well be enhanced by a Mexican economy that is more competitive internationally, the outlook for professionals in the short term (through the end of the 20th century) was not bright.   

     The social and political implications of these changes for the future—hardly confined to Mexico—are profound.  If economic recovery after the crisis of the 1980s continues to produce disappointing rates of social mobility, lower and middleclass political pressure in Mexico will continue to mount.  This pressure has already been a factor in significant political shifts in Mexico—for example, in the spreading influence of the PAN in 1994 and 1995.  And while political pressure is apparently leading to some reforms at a few universities, institutional modifications cannot resolve the fundamental stresses that have shaped the university system since the 1940s. 

  

Endnotes 

¹  Sometimes this view seems to be gaining ascendancy in Mexico, although the situation is still generally blamed on putative failings of the university system.  See, for example, Ivonne Melgar, “Propician desempleo las deficiencias en educación superior,” Uno más Uno, 18 Dec. 1994, 1, 8.  That Mexican university graduates have trouble finding employment, at least, has now become fairly obvious to everyone.   

² A professional is defined here as a person equipped with both general knowledge and the ability to apply this knowledge to production or management to increased productivity, introduce innovations, or spread attitudes and techniques.  A technician's main function in the workplace, in contrast, is to apply specific techniques learned through the educational process. 

³ Ideally, of course, numerous technicians should be educated to support each professional.  But the ratio in Mexico by the 1980s was unusually large.  The ratio in the United States in 1985 was 1.5 technicians for each professional, whereas that for Mexico was almost twice that at 2.7 to 1 in 1980 (for data by industrial sector, see Programa de Seguimiento de Egresados UANL, Estudio sobre el egresado al titularse en la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León 1980/81 (Monterrey: N.p. [UANL], n.d.[1981]). See Statistical Abstract of the United States (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1987), 385-386. For a brief sketch of the U.S. case, see the discussion of John K. Folger and Charles B. Nam, “Education of the American Population,” in Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 66-68.  

⁴ Data are adapted from the decennial censuses;  see Lorey, Rise of the Professions.  Compound rates of change calculated using the following formula:  annual rate equals antilog of (log(P_n/P_o)/n), minus 1, where P_o equals the original population and P_n equals the population after n year. The census data do not allow for calculation of implicit annual growth rates of professional and technician EAP by decade. 

⁵ See Jesús Reyes Heroles González Garza, Política macroeconómica y bienestar en México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983), 95, 102; and Peter Gregory's discussion of Reyes Heroles in The Myth of Market Failure, 255–56.  Neither author specifically compares professional wages to technician wages. 

⁶ Cited in Myers, Education and National Development, 123. 

⁷ It is probably impossible to determine the extent of overlap in the case of Mexico given available data.  It is not easy to ascertain even in the case of the United States, with the availability of comparatively rich statistical resources. See Folger and Nam, “Education of the American Population,” in Berg, Education and Jobs, 66-67. 

⁸ An egresado has finished coursework but has not completed the final project for the degree. 

⁹ It is necessary to restrict consideration to the 1975-80 period for registrations because changes in regulations caused a major surge in degrees registered between 1974 and 1975. 

¹⁰ Los profesionistas en México, 50, 56. 

¹¹ See “Even Elite Graduates Face Bleak Job Picture in Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 24 1995, A1, A9. 

¹² For detailed discussion of these estimates, see David Lorey and Aída Mostkoff Linares,  “Mexico's ‘Lost Decade,’ 1980-90:  Evidence on Class Structure and Professional Employment from the 1990 Census,” Statistical Abstract of Latin America,  vol. 30, part 2 (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center), 1339-1360.  For a note on regional unemployment of university graduates, see Leonardo Félix Escalante and Alicia Barroso Lugo, “El desempleo de los profesionistas en Hermosillo,” El Financiero, 30 June 1995, 18. 

¹³ See Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1964), 232-233; and Clark Reynolds, The Mexican Economy: Twentieth Century Structure and Growth (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1970), 236-238. 

¹⁴ See William P. Glade, “Revolution and Economic Development: A Mexican Reprise,” in William P. Glade and Charles W. Anderson, The Political Economy of Mexico (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 87-88. 

¹⁵ Frank Tannenbaum early recognized this relationship in Mexico. See his Mexico, 198. 

¹⁶ “La investigación tecnológica, en crisis,” Uno más Uno, 29 Jan. 1990, 3, claims that 92 percent of Mexican businesses, both public and private, possess obsolete machinery.  An additional problem is that so much Mexican industry, 90 percent of so, is small and medium size—that is, too small to invest significant funds in R & D:  see Ivonne Melgar, “Propician desempleo,” 8. 

¹⁷ The author of “La investigación tecnológica, en crisis,” Uno más Uno, 29 Jan. 1990, 3, claims that Mexico invests ten times as much to import capital goods than in research and development.  Little scholarly work has been done on the relationship between the production of capital goods and the demand for professional expertise in Mexico; the best study for Latin America is that of Nathaniel H. Leff, The Brazilian Capital Goods Industry, 1929-1964 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), especially 41-87.  For an interesting analysis of the relationship between technological development and economic growth in Mexico, see Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo, A.C. (CIDAC), Tecnología e industria en el futuro de México: Posibles vinculaciones estratégicas (México, D. F.: Editorial Diana, 1989).  See also Anne Lorentzen, Capital Goods and Technological Development in Mexico (Copenhagen: Centre for Development Research, 1986), especially 13-14.  

¹⁸ See Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, Participación del sector público en el producto interno bruto de México, 1975-1983 (México, D. F.: Secretaría de Programación y Presupuesto 1984), 5. 

¹⁹ See James W. Wilkie, The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), passim; and Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution:  Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 213, 215. 

²⁰ See Carlos Muñoz Izquierdo’s comments in “Desde México:  Debatir la orientación profesionalzante.” Universidad Futura, vol. 4: no. 12 (Fall, 1993), 22. 

²¹ For a review of these issues, see The Economist, 4 Jan. 1992, 15-18. 

²² It is all too common to assert the opposite without evidence from the historical record: see, for example, José de Jesús Guardarrama H., “México necesita multiplicar 20 veces su número de ingenieros antes de 25 años,” El Financiero, 29 April 1988, 53 (Guardarrama reports on comments of Daniel Reséndiz, director of UNAM's engineer-ing faculty);  also, more recently, Rubén Vásquez Pérez, “Grave rezago tecnológico,” Uno más Uno, 18 Dec. 1994, 8. 

²³ The reasons why a self-sustaining and competitive Mexican industry did not develop can be traced to the dynamic of the first wave of industrialization in Mexico, 1890-1940.  Stephen Haber suggests that constraints such as a low rate of capacity utilization, low productivity of labor, and difficulties in mobilizing capital led to a manufacturing sector that could not export competitively, needed a great deal of protection, and relied heavily upon imported capital goods.  See Haber, The Industrialization of Mexico.  

²⁴ To assess changes in quality, I developed three data sets: (1) per student expenditure on higher education; (2) teacher-student ratios; and (3) ratios of full-time faculty to teaching staff hired on an hourly basis.  These three indicators form a very useful, if imperfect, gauge of quality.  For a discussion of quality at Latin American universities and its measurement, see Arthur Liebman, Kenneth N. Walker, and Myron Glazer, Latin American University Students: A Six Nation Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 68-78. See also Coombs, Strategy to Improve the Quality of Mexican Higher Education, 31-32. 

²⁵ See Olac Fuentes Molinar, “Universidad y democracia: La mirada hacia la izquierda,” Cuadernos Políticos, 53 (January/April, 1981), 418. 

²⁶ Guillermo de la Peña and Ingrid Rosenbleuth, “Posibilidades de una educación paralela,” in Gilberto Guevara Niebla, La crisis de la educación superior en México (México, D. F.:  Nueva Imagen, 1981), cited in Carlos Ornelas, “Formación de cuadros profesionales, mercado de trabajo y necesidades sociales,” paper presented at IV Comité Regional de la UNESCO, Villahermosa, 19 May 1988, 2. 

²⁷ Trends since the 1980s are complicated by the emergence of myriad small private institutions that provide low quality preparation in a few fields. These institutions hardly qualify as “universities” and yet they are included in the ANUIES data.  Many low cost private institutions developed to absorb students rejected by the large public universities: see Jorge Campo, “Captan colegios privados a la mayoría de los rechazados de la UNAM,” El Universal, 12 July 1992, 1, 36. 

²⁸ See Coombs, Strategy to Improve the Quality of Mexican Higher Education, 75-77. 

²⁹ Because of these trends, it is no longer desirable to focus analysis on UNAM, which in the past was viewed as a microcosm of the Mexican university system. 

³⁰ One scholar has termed these technicians “lumpen professsionals”:  Marcos Kaplan cited in Carlos Ornelas, “Formación de cuadros profesionales, mercado de trabajo y necesidades sociales,” paper presented at IV Comité Regional de la UNESCO, Villahermosa, 19 May 1988, 12. 

³¹ See Lorey, Rise, Tables 55-57, for data on social class of university students. 

³² Carlos Ornelas, “Formación de cuadros profesionales, mercado de trabajo y necesidades sociales,” 18. 

³³ Carlos Ornelas, “Formación de cuadros profesionales,” 29-30. 

³⁴ See Carlos Muñoz Izquierdo’s comments in “Desde México:  Debatir la orientación profesionalzante,” 25. 

³⁵ Stresses experienced in Latin American countries over the past few decades are increasingly apparent in developed countries as well:  see, for example, George J. Church, “The White Collar Layoffs that We’re Seeing Are Permanent and Structural,” Time, 22 Nov. 1993, 34-39.  In an accompanying box, John Greenwald states that “fully 30 percent of new [U.S. college] graduates will be underutilized between now and 2005 ” (p. 37). 

³⁶ Pablo González Casanova, “México: El ciclo de una revolución agraria,“ Cuadernos Americanos, 120, no. 1 (January/February, 1962). Compare González's later comments on social mobility in Democracia en México (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1965). 

³⁷ Fernando Ortega Pizarro, “Se han perdido las clases medias, que son las que producen ahorro, trabajo. . . y revoluciones,” Proceso, 982 (28 August 1995), 16. 

³⁸ Sonia Morales, “En la calidad educativa no se dará un paso atrás,” Proceso, 981 (21 Aug. 1995), 40-41;  on the occupation, see Reforma, 24 Sept. 1995 (web version).  The problem was most acute at the UNAM, the symbolic importance of which remained considerable.  Carlos Ornelas estimates that there existed 217,000 university places for 197,000 applicants in the Mexico City area; thus pressure on the UNAM has other than purely quantitative sources.  Personal communication, 28 Sept. 1995.  In a ripple effect, more than 100,000 applicants were rejected from the UNAM’s dependent preparatory schools. 

³⁹ Reforma, 21 July 1996, A1. 

⁴⁰ Dirección de Planeación Universitaria, Universidad en cifras (Monterrey:  UANL, various years). 

⁴¹ See María Amparo Casar, “La reestructuración de la participación del estado en la industria nacional,” El Cotidiano, 23 (1988), 28–38; on the effect of privatization of banks on professional employment, see Mark Stevenson, “The Graduates:  Mexican Universities Grind Out the Unemployed,” El Financiero, International Edition, 28 Oct. 1994, 3.