Affordable and high-quality education as a basis for sustainable social equality

Education in Latin America and the Caribbean remains a problematic area despite the progress made in recent years. Access to education has improved significantly: almost all children attend primary school and access to secondary education has expanded, but tertiary enrolment is low.

One of the main factors contributing to the low tertiary enrolment is the heterogeneity in the quality of secondary education between the public and private school sectors. Due to the relatively low salaries of teachers in public schools as a result of the disproportionately high workload of public school teachers, there is a significant difference in the quality of schooling between the public and private secondary education sectors. Inequality at the secondary level is reflected in the admission results of applicants to public universities, where depending on the educational programme, the competition varies from 40 to 200 people per state-funded place.

Given this heterogeneity in the quality of education, more than 75% of tertiary students are enrolled in private universities according to the OECD. In 2021, the percentage of adults aged 25-64 in Latin American and Caribbean countries with tertiary education averaged 20.68% of the total population in this age group, which confirms that there are quite serious problems of access to higher education. The demand for specialists with higher education in the labor market is 11% higher than the share of employed graduates with a secondary vocational education diploma.

In this vein, considering the problem of access to higher education in Latin American and Caribbean countries from the perspective of reducing inequalities within and between countries is a reasonable and targeted reference point for discussion within the framework of the thematic session of the Conference.