A study has found the nation’s higher education institutions out of step with the nation’s human resource needs, disconnected from the employment market, indifferent to national and international problems, weak in research, and unprepared to face the challenges of a globalized, technologically-oriented world. The findings are contained in a report prepared by educator Manuel Herasme and economist Pablo Rodriguez, who studied the nation’s 28 universities and 7 higher technical institutes over a sixteen month period. Based on interviews with university administrators, instructors, students, graduates and employers, they concluded; a) University teachers are generally solid professionals, but lack teaching skills; b) universities have no regular channels of communication with the job markets in which their graduates must compete; c) scientific and technological research receive scant attention; d) only 68% of the institutions studied take cognizance of national or international issues in planning, e) technological advance and the globalization of markets are largely ignored; f) barely 38% of universities have any kind of environmental protection function; g) physical facilities and equipment are generally poor. It was learned that 97% of university staff interviewed believe that their greatest difficulty is the poor level of preparation of the students coming from secondary school. But the report also found a problem that 80% of the nation’s 216,000 enrolled students are majoring in just ten fields, with 68% of them concentrated in medicine, law, accounting, marketing, computer science, education, and business administration. This illustrates the "nonalignment between the number and type of graduates, and the "capacity of the economy to assimilate and use them in a productive way, the report concluded.
