| Title |
International
Migrations
in Latin America and the Caribbean
Edition Nš 65
May-August 2002
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| Author: |
Permanent Secretariat of SELA |
|
Index |
PROFESSIONAL EMIGRATION
IN THE KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE SOCIETY:
A FEW UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Claudio Rama
Director of the International Institute for Higher Education of Latin America and the
Caribbean (IESALC/UNESCO)
To convene a seminar to discuss the issues of integration, migration and higher education
is to acknowledge the existence of a vast number of questions that have remained
unanswered. Thus, the need arises to gather experts, governments representatives and
institutions to exchange points of view, debate theoretical frameworks and provide an
overview that may contribute to new ideas, hypotheses and answers regarding the new
aspects of migration, remittances, migrants' training and the role of national education
structures within the context of globalization, the new knowledge-intensive society, the
current economic and social problems of Latin America and the Caribbean and the future
scenarios arising from the FTAA negotiations.
From the perspective of the UNESCO, and particularly the IESALC -the International
Institute for Higher Education of Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the body the
General Conference created to deal with this issue- many are the questions that need to be
answered.
Ever since the nineties it became apparent that the expansion of higher education in Latin
America and the Caribbean has substantially transformed the scenario of tertiary education
in the region. The considerable increase in the number of students enrolled in higher
education courses is one of the results of such expansion. Indeed, by the end of the XX
century the number of such students in the region had increased from 270 thousand in the
1950's to almost 10 million. Higher education has become a mass phenomenon. In spite of
the high level of desertion and the low efficiency levels, every year close to 700
thousand students graduate from the region's higher education institutions. During the
1950's the total number of professionals in the region barely reached 600 thousand. Today
the number of professionals who graduate each year is higher than the total number of
college graduates in the region fifty years ago.
In Latin America and the Caribbean the percentage of higher education graduates within the
total population is 23%, considerably lower than the average in the USA (80%) and Europe
(65%). However this varies according to the country, fluctuating between 38% in Argentina
and 12% in Guatemala. Also, these percentages tend to increase as a result of government
policies aimed at promoting higher education. This, together with higher education's
stronger income-yielding capacity, has led an important sector of the region's population
to invest in education.
The acknowledgment of education as a means to insure progress and social upward mobility
has contributed to a process of diversification of tertiary education institutions. By the
end of the 1990's the massive institutional expansion and diversification of education had
produced more than 8,000 higher education institutions in the region, compared with the
few that existed just decades ago. Today the region's universities, institutes,
polytechnics, professional colleges, both public and private, profit and non-profit,
provide an extremely diversified scenario, together with the 20 macro universities with
over 60 thousand enrolled students.
This new institutional scenario is the result of the dynamic expansion of private
education. This represents another of the sharpest transformations in the region's higher
education structure. Close to 3 million students in the region are enrolled in private
institutions. In some countries such as Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador and Chile the
majority of students are enrolled in private, rather than public institutions. This new
educational system has developed unhindered by state regulation and without proper
coordination between institutions. Generally, the new institutions' academic curricula
respond to students' demand rather than the needs of the labor market.
Moreover, higher education graduates tend to have an extremely similar and general type of
preparation. In fact, the region's educational structure is based on outdated school and
faculty models that do not offer flexible and diversified curricula, thus producing
similarly skilled professionals. Moreover, because of the predominance of traditional
university curricula over technical careers a high percentage of higher education
graduates have a similar academic background.
Another issue that causes concern is the level of preparation of higher education
graduates. All data indicate that such level has tended to decrease compared to the
parameters established in the center countries. This is a result of the over saturation of
public institutions - the number of students per class room has increased to such levels
as to render inefficient all pedagogical efforts; the absence of controls and quality
evaluation systems; the fall in budget allocations for higher education; the disappearance
of the editorial industry and a generalized deterioration of libraries, as well as the
lack of a policy aimed at stimulating the training of educators. Moreover, within the
framework of traditional education, the vast increase in the number of students has been
accompanied by an increase in the number of teachers, many of whom lack the needed level
of training. It is estimated that only 5% of university professors have a doctorate
degree. This reveals a fall in the average level of training of higher education staff,
which in turn is reflected in the fall in the quality of higher education.
Based on the above considerations we can conclude that the quality level of the new waves
of higher education graduates is average (compared with the rest of the world) and their
specializations few, as the curricula are not relevant to the needs of the labor market.
The majority of majors offered are in traditional fields that require low levels of
investment, while the market demand in these areas is very limited. At the same time,
knowledge has experienced significant transformations as a result of the scientific
revolution that has rendered obsolete many areas of knowledge and established vast
differences in quality among educational structures worldwide. It is not by chance that
thousands of students from peripheral countries choose to study in the central countries,
thus contributing to finance educational centers in those countries.
Ever since the 1980's these complex phenomena have led to a persistent increase in the
unemployment level among professionals and experts and to their permanent emigration. We
are not referring here to the so-called brain drain of the 1970's but rather to a
generalized process of selective migration involving university graduates, which central
countries stimulate through specific legal frameworks.
It is true that the region is experiencing an economic crisis that affects the ability of
the labor market to absorb the large number of higher education graduates. It is also true
that the wages offered in the central countries differ greatly from those offered in the
countries of the region for skilled workers and experts and that this stimulates
migration. However, it is also true that the unbalance between the supply of and demand
for professionals in the public sector is partly due to universities' autonomy and the
lack of effective coordination policies. In the private sector this is often the result of
the tendency to allocate jobs within the family. The type of curricula, which do not
respond to the needs of the labor market, represents a real problem.
This analytical introduction leads us to the questions without answers we referred to at
the beginning of this dissertation. These are the questions the IESALC aims to answer:
Should the region slow down
the increase in higher education graduates, at least as far as public education is
concerned, in order to decrease the number of unemployed skilled workers and migrants?
What can be done regarding the growing emigration of professionals, considering that the
average cost of educating each professional is $8,000 per year?
Are the remittances sent home
by professionals who emigrate larger than the investment made by society to train them?
The current public financing
method is not equitable since it favors the middle class. In the region the middle class
represents 15% of the population, yet 45% of students enrolled in higher education
institutions are from this sector. Also, in some countries the indigenous native
population represents a high percentage of the total population - 50 % in Bolivia, 48% in
Guatemala, 38% in Peru and 25% in Ecuador - yet its access to higher education is
extremely low. Are migrants thus being favored? Should we return to policies such as those
implemented during the communist era, when Jews, for example, were not allowed to migrate
unless they paid back the cost of their studies?
Often our college graduates
do not enter other countries as professionals but are rather demoted to technicians. Why
do our higher education graduates end up working in jobs that require lower academic
levels in developed countries? We are all too familiar with situations in which engineers
from our region are hired as technicians in other countries or architects are employed as
draftsmen. We should ask ourselves whether we are preparing our students for two different
markets - two different job insertions - due to the low quality level of our educational
systems compared to the level of skills provided in the higher education institutions of
the countries to which our professionals emigrate.
The IESALC has attempted to
include the discussion on the issue of higher education in the debates on migration in the
belief that in the new information and knowledge society those who migrate will be mostly
professionals, attracted by the growing demand for skilled workers in developed countries,
where jobs are available in the area of services and specialized training. The increasing
tendency in European countries to limit the access of non-skilled immigrants strengthens
this scenario.
Thus, emigration is no longer an escape valve for low skilled workers, since their access
to center countries will be increasingly restricted. Professionals, on the other hand,
will continue to emigrate and this will lead to a permanent drain of skilled human
resources to the point where developing countries may end up playing the role of training,
at a lesser cost, the technicians and some professionals required by those economies whose
development is based on the massive availability of such skilled workers.
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