Constituent process and regional state universities

To analyze Higher Education in the country we must know its epic and how the deconstruction of a system that today is in permanent tension begins. Understand that this was not always the case, because in its origins there was a strong public vocation, where education was not conceived as a business, but as a powerful tool for the development of the country.
At present, the State has forced us to be part of a system based on mistrust and competition rather than cooperation. Thus, we compete for students, project financing and even for the academic body. Proof of this is that universities, especially those with resources, spare no financial effort to incorporate into their academic body the best professionals, including those who belong to other universities in the system, who cannot compete economically to retain them. This situation hinders the establishment of the academic career and the construction of virtuous nuclei of specialists in regions and with greater acuity in extreme areas.
From my time as a student at a state university, I clearly remember the feeling that the State, our owner, did not take full charge of its development, not even basal. An assertion that I make with respect and without ignoring the effort made by some authorities. However, the truth is that we are facing a model that forces us to seek financing with tariffs or requires competing to obtain resources with institutions that lead the way, thanks to their financial power. It seems that the Chilean State forgot that, in addition to training professionals and aware of our role as public universities, we generate knowledge relevant to the territory, we link without seeking profit, we give opportunities to young people who cannot migrate and we receive students with entry conditions that require a double effort to level their knowledge and transform them into suitable professionals.
In this framework we also offer careers considered as “unprofitable”, in areas such as pedagogies and sciences, so that they respond to the needs of their areas of origin. With all these asymmetries, we are relevant actors in the territory, especially now in the context of the process of decentralization and regional development with the installation of regional governorates.
Why, then, do we continue to suffer from this reality, unlike what happens in any country and we are not financed by the State to continue working with quality? The answer and solution to this question obviously requires the claim of the Chilean State for its universities, and it seems that this is closer today thanks to the Constitutional Convention. Instance with which it is working to install the issue of the validation of state and regional universities in extreme areas, without the logic of the market and profitability.
Thus, before the Constituent Process and the election of our new President Gabriel Boric, the state universities of a regional nature and, especially, those of extreme areas, we are hopeful of being part of a norm that is present in the Constitution that will be plebiscite in 2022, and that will show the urgent need to be valued, not only for teaching, research and links with the environment, but for the social mobility that thousands of young professionals and their families have experienced, throughout our history and country.
 
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Original source in Spanish