University of Costa Rica- University of Whom?

University of Costa Rica- University of Whom?

By I.Carranza.

Costa Rica is known worldwide for investing a great amount of resources in education. For instance, 1.3% of GDP is invested in public universities. The University of Costa Rica (UCR) receives 50% of this percentage, yet it seems that this system has not been entirely effective in helping the poor. Contrary to what it is commonly argued, high-school students from well-off families, especially those who attend Rodrigo Facio campus, have benefited the most.

An article from La Nación, “Alumnos de colegios privados con más opción de ingresar a la UCR” depicts this concern. Fernández shows that students from private and semi-private high schools have twice probabilities of being admitted into college than those from public ones. Based on this source, among all the students from private high schools that took the admission exam, 47% were accepted into a major; the percentage of students from semi-private high schools accepted was almost the same, standing at 46%. For students from public high schools, however, the percentage was a meager 23%. Besides these numbers, journalist Sergio Morales, in his article “U públicas, para los de más ingreso,” showed that, in Rodrigo Facio campus, 63% of students come from private high schools. In her doctoral thesis, Silvia Castro, current Rector of ULACIT, makes another interesting observation. In "Costa Rican higher education, its universities and students," Castro points that from the total of high school students, only 9% attend a private institution. So, if 63% out of that small 9% are being admitted, students from public schools are underrepresented. If so, this is provoking a socially and economically unequal system.

Others argue that the system is actually having an adverse effect on the poor. For instance, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, a researcher from the Cato Institute, points out that poor people are paying taxes to subsidy the education of the upper middle class. Hidalgo also mentions, in his blog titled Hood Robin en Acción, that well-off families originally invest on private schools and pay considerable amounts of money for it. Yet when they get to college, they pay much less for higher education than what they used to pay in high school. Hidalgo refers to this issue as the Hood Robin effect because it is an inverted effect; the rich take advantage of the poor.

The question, then, is how to mitigate this situation? Recently, the UCR headmaster, Henning Jensen, implemented a new program called +Equidad, which intents to improve the access to people from public high schools with a low-academic performance. This system assigns 400 spots, specifically for high schools that may obtain 12% or less of admitted students. After the regular admission process ends, those students who belong to these institutions enter into a second round for admission.

However, economist Thelmo Vargas and Juan Carlos Hidalgo, along with politicians like Otto Guevara and Ottón Solís, have argued that a deeper change is needed to reverse the situation. They have suggested that the UCR should modify the tuition system so that the students who can afford it pay properly for their education.

But the UCR authorities refuse this idea of modifying the tuition system because it goes against the institution’s social principles and because they have higher expectations from the +Equidad program. Yet why playing this pointless back and forth game? While this is a controversial situation, we should consider that if we change the tuition system, we could have more resources to run programs such as Jensen’s +Equidad or to provide more scholarships for low-income students. In this way, we could integrate both proposals and take advantage of both. At the end, this is not about classes engaging raids for education opportunities; this is about providing opportunities for all based on their financial status, be it poor or be it rich. As critical UCR students we dare to preach so often, we should question our current system. We ought to support a more equitable organization that provides favorable conditions for all groups in our society.