For more than an hour, the Undersecretary of Education, Víctor Orellana, held the inaugural talk of the Summer Academy of the Catholic University of the Santísima Concepción.
There were several points addressed by the Ministry of Education authority. Among them, the timeline on national access to higher education institutions and its link with production, curricular frameworks and scientific productivity, and a series of proposals for the renewal of all these topics.
“Regional universities have a very relevant mission, which is to build the cultural, professional, and technical conditions for a greater degree of development and modernization of our regions,” Orellana commented following the presentation.
“We are working on plans to strengthen regional universities in such a way that they can have an organic growth in their enrollment, which means linking territorial needs and that they have financing instruments that allow more agile and more efficient spending, in addition to continuing to improve.” the financing instruments that we already have to strengthen regional universities,” he added.
Regarding the research and science work of the study houses, outside the Metropolitan region, the undersecretary commented that “we need to improve and increase capabilities. For this, together with the Ministry of Science, as a government, we are developing different policies aimed at increasing and improving capabilities because sometimes the system of competitive projects assumes that there are equal conditions in the application and in competition and that is not the case. , financing is required to build these institutional capacities and in the regions we need specialized knowledge.”
-One of the things you raised in your talk was that the credit system (for the student) is no longer sustainable…
-For example, the United States and the United Kingdom, which have had important student credit and subsidized credit policies, are in a debate precisely to overcome this financing instrument given that they have many problems in its design and implementation.
In our case we have the commitment of the President (Gabriel Boric), and also a time frame established by Minister Cataldo and the Minister of Finance, in which we are going to present this project before the next budget year, that is, before September this year. Because it also seems to us that the mechanism can be surpassed by another much more efficient one that responds better to the right to education, that also gives more solid financing to the institutions and that is healthier from a fiscal point of view.
–You also mentioned that a replacement for the CAE is being considered…
-It is addressing the presidential commitment to overcome the State Guaranteed Credit instrument in the time frames that Minister (of Education) Cataldo and Minister (of Finance) Marcel have defined.
-After the Paes, what options are there to retain regional talents who choose to go to the universities of Santiago?
-Being a person who comes from the Atacama Region myself, I know this problem very well, and that is going to require a process of complexity, improvement of local institutions, but not only of the universities, but also a general complexity of the social, economic and cultural life of our regions. That is, we need more productive investment.
(…) Job training, training, creates conditions for productive investment. Investment, for example, in ports, investment in the tourism industry, investment in strengthening, for example, our wood industry, bringing to a more added level of value, for example. And that requires technical professionals.
It is that circuit of development that we would like, which will then make the social structure of the regions more complex with more art, with more culture, with more production of literature, for example, with more cinema. And that will generate a network of relationships that will make people stay in the region.
It is a long-term process, there is no magic solution, I would like to give it to you. But it is a slow process that we are going to promote as a government, in a government that has policies for development. Unlike other times when we thought as a country that development was a spontaneous process, which came practically alone and today we know that this is not the case, which is why we require public policies that move in this direction.
Text: Nelson Ojeda – Diario Concepción
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