Pandemic Pulls Millions of Students Out of Latin American Universities

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Her mother, a housekeeper, never made it past second grade. Her father, a policeman, never finished high school.

Nevertheless, Lina Prieto had earned a place in the creative writing program at Colombia’s most prestigious public university. Her goal, to write the next great Latin American novel, felt within reach.

Over the past two decades, millions of young people in Latin America became the first members of their families to go to college, a historic expansion that promised to propel a generation into the professional arena and transform the region.

Now, as the pandemic sweeps across Latin America, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and devastating economies, an alarming setback is occurring: millions of university students are dropping out, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

Enrollment is expected to drop by as much as 25 percent in Colombia by the end of the year, with similar figures in other countries.

The exodus threatens decades of achievements that helped pull whole communities out of poverty and represents a major setback for a region struggling to escape its centuries-old trap — an often destructive dependence on the export of raw materials — and move toward a knowledge-based economy.

Prieto, a 30-year-old single mother who helps support her parents, lost her job as a receptionist. Unable to pay her tuition, she dropped out of school and also lost her daughter’s spot in the university’s preschool.

“This was my year,” she said. “And everything has fallen apart”.

Since the early 2000s, massive investment in elementary and high-school programmes, as well as the decision to build new universities, helped higher education enrolment across Latin America more than double, from around 20 percent to more than 50 percent of the university-age population, according to the World Bank.

The expansion allowed millions of previously excluded people, including indigenous, rural and black students, to go to university.

“We were on a positive trajectory; we were changing the narrative,” said Sandra Garcia, a Colombian investigator who studies education at the time of COVID-19 for the United Nations. “This shock is going to jeopardize much of that progress”.

As the health crisis deepened, The New York Times spent weeks speaking to students, parents, professors, officials and university rectors from across Colombia.

Amid confinement, youth unemployment has skyrocketed and many students are unable to afford tuition, which even in public universities can amount to between one and eight times the minimum monthly wage.

Most courses have moved online, but millions of people do not have the service or a reliable cellphone connection.

At Colombia’s leading educational institution, the Dean, Leonardo Fabio Martinez, said that up to half of students may leave their studies this year, raising questions about who will be the teachers of the next generation of grade school students.

At a public university in the city of Manizales, one professor said it was costing her architecture students the price of one week of groceries to connect to the internet via cellphone for a single day of classes.

Some students said they were going hungry to pay for data, while others hid in stairwells to boost Wi-Fi from neighbors, tapping out papers on cellphones only to be confronted by the spinning wheel of internet doom just as they hit send.

Young women, in particular, face the highest unemployment rates in the country. Some have resorted to so-called webcam work, in which they perform sexual acts on the Internet in exchange for money.

For generations, many of Latin America’s largest economies have focused on commodities (oil, gold, large-scale agriculture), causing governments to rely on sometimes dangerous environmental and labor practices and to be exposed to the ups and downs of global price-setting.

In recent years, as developing countries in Asia and elsewhere have moved into e-commerce and high-tech sectors, Latin America has lagged behind.

Eric Hershberg, who heads the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University in Washington DC, said the solution lies in higher education.

However, a large number of students are being lost, a loss that could turn into an explosive resentment in the coming months, said Saulo de Avila, 23, a psychology student.

“This is going to be a trigger,” said De Ávila, the son of farmers who has been using a borrowed cellphone since the pandemic began, rapping on the Internet to get donations.

“As soon as the pandemic subsides,” he said, “a lot of people will come out to protest.”

The challenge for many students is not only not having internet or a computer. Many share cellphones with relatives and live in places where coverage is patchy.

Recently, Wendi Kuetgaje, 22, sat barefoot in the middle of a group of trees next to her house in a rural indigenous community east of Bogotá.

Kuetgaje, an anthropology student, was looking at her mother’s cellphone, trying to decipher what the teacher was saying about involuntary linguistic symbols and the function of myths with a terrible connection.

Towards the end of the lesson, the professor asked for feedback. Kuetgaje had managed to listen to half of the class. Zoom had failed at least eight times. She looked like she was going to cry.

“They’re talking,” she said, as the sound faltered and her classmates chatted, “but I can’t hear them.”

Kuetgaje attends the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá on a scholarship. As a child, her family fled violence in her home state of Amazonas. Now they live on the Maguare reserve with 25 other families.

They have limited electricity and survive mostly from tourist visits, which have stopped during the pandemic. Her sister, Johana, is an attorney and is the only person in her community with a university degree.

Wendi Kuetgaje, whose parents are Uitoto and Tatuyo, plans to study indigenous peoples. “Other people have always studied us,” she said. “We, as indigenous people, can also tell our own stories.”

However, when she started attending classes, she immediately felt distanced from her more affluent and knowledgeable classmates. “I have learned to be silent,” she said, “so as not to create conflict.”

Her younger brother, Jefferson, 19, a law student who hopes to become the next community leader, dropped out last semester because of these connection issues. Now he has returned to school and is connecting on his father’s cell phone from a grass field, with a notebook perched on his knees for hours.

“The Civil Code has been discriminatory against many minority communities,” his Roman law professor said one day in a video. Chickens flocked around Jefferson. “It’s up to all of you to finally change it.”

Source: infobae