Quality of Higher Education, a Regression in Critical Training: The Case of the Autonomous University of Guerrero

Abstract: The current models of higher education in Mexico and several countries have adopted accreditation of performance standards as a way of ensuring quality in education and graduation processes. The labor and business markets, due to their competitive environment, use requirements of this type to identify the best elements of human capital to be incorporated into their instrumental processes. To meet the demand for a trained workforce that acts efficiently in this globalized and highly competitive world, universities make changes that promote vocational training to the detriment of critical values.

This study presents an analysis of the historical path of the Autonomous University of Guerrero (Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero or UAGro); an institution that has played a leading role in political scenarios, championing popular causes of democratic openness and social justice from the 1960s to the 1980s, but that since the early 1990s, has been immersed in a gradual process of increasing the quality of education in accordance with national policies. Thanks to its constant evolution and renewal over the last decades, the UAGro has managed to establish itself as a university with educational models that support competent education and instrumental rationality. In this context, the objective of this work is focused on determining the stages of academic development through which the institution has undergone, and in analyzing its contribution in the formation of critical subjects in the perspective of its development as an institution of educational quality.

Among the main conclusions reached, is that the UAGro focuses its efforts on ensuring quality education to respond to the requirements of the current neoliberal scenarios, and at the same time, maintains its university-people project to promote and monitor democratic life in favor of social inclusion, much in need in the State of Guerrero, which has many shortages of resources.

Key words: education policy; educational quality; critical values

JEL code: H520