In Colombia, public universities have continued to operate, but budgetary pressures intensified between 2015 and 2025. This mechanism destroys without deciding: allocations increase on paper, follow the consumer price index, and generally fail to cover the actual increase in laboratory operating costs, scientific equipment, or academic salaries. Enrollments grow, while the budgetary base does not increase proportionally to the real needs of universities.
The Essential Points
- Indexation to inflation, not to real costs, produces budgetary degradation without visible formal decision.
- In Colombia, budgetary pressures affected per-student financing; in Peru, laboratories closed between 2020 and 2025.
- Academic salaries have experienced erosion in purchasing power in Latin America in recent years.
- In several American states, notably Wisconsin and Illinois, the same mechanism reduced research staff over fifteen years.
- The critical point approaches when a university loses its autonomous training capacity and tips into dependence on private or foreign funders.
A Budget That Rises, a University That Shrinks
The mechanism works like this. In Colombia, national contributions to public universities were adjusted annually according to inflation within the legal framework of Law 30. The nominal envelope increases. Rectors hail the progress. Unions denounce it as insufficient.
In the hallways, an analytical chemistry laboratory closes, a senior lecturer position is not renewed, purchase of a sequencer is postponed.
The gap between general inflation and the real costs of running a university tends to be recurrent. Laboratory reagents follow global industrial prices. Subscriptions to scientific journals increase 6 to 8 percent per year over the past twenty years. State-of-the-art equipment is purchased in euros or dollars. Public universities in Latin America face dual pressure: international costs rise while local currency depreciates.
In Colombia, the under-indexation mechanism has absorbed a significant portion of real resources per student over a decade. A university cannot train the same number of students with nominal resources that have not kept pace with the actual increase in its costs. Yet enrollments have grown.
In Peru, Laboratory Closures Without Formal Decree
The Peruvian case is documented with unusual precision. University laboratories have closed in several public universities across the country in the recent period. The wording deserves attention: closure, not temporary suspension, not restructuring. These capacities have diminished.
Behind each closure, the same chain of events. Equipment breaks down. Maintenance costs more than the university can afford. Spare parts must be imported. The laboratory stops accepting students.
The person in charge leaves, often abroad or to the private sector. No one makes the decision to close: decline happens gradually, without visible formal action.
Peru compounds several aggravating factors. High volatility of the sol against the dollar raises equipment import costs. Geographic concentration of the best universities in Lima deprives Andean and Amazonian regions of technical resources from the first cuts onward. And the shift toward quantitative assessment of public universities, launched after the 2014 university law, directed available budgets toward publication and accreditation indicators, at the expense of maintaining physical infrastructure.
What these closures take with them is not recoverable in a few years of refinancing. Trained researchers leave. Collaboration networks unravel. Decades of accumulated field data disappear. A destroyed scientific capacity takes a generation to rebuild, if it rebuilds at all.
Salaries That Erode Academic Vocations
The salaries of faculty researchers have experienced erosion in purchasing power in Latin America in recent years. For contract and part-time workers, who carry out an increasing share of teaching, this degradation is often more pronounced.
Salary erosion creates adverse selection. Profiles that can leave do leave. A biochemistry PhD trained in Bogotá or Lima has a scientific passport readable in Madrid, Paris, or Montreal. European universities actively recruit in Latin America, partly because candidates are excellent and partly because their salary expectations remain below local standards. This flow is not new, but it accelerates when local working conditions deteriorate.
Public universities in Latin America lose not so much positions as intellectual density. Researchers who remain are often those whose international mobility is most constrained, for family, administrative, or linguistic reasons, and not necessarily those with the weakest profiles. The concentration of available talent nonetheless shrinks. Seminars are less well attended. Interdisciplinary collaborations grow sparser.
Research retreats to what costs least to produce.
The parallel with AI is direct here: an economy that does not invest in advanced training of its own researchers ends up outsourcing its cognitive capacity. It consumes science produced elsewhere; it no longer produces it.
Wisconsin and Illinois Preceded Bogotá
The mechanism is not unique to Latin America. Some American public universities have experienced for years a similar mechanism: state funding increases more slowly than real operating costs, and universities compensate by raising tuition or cutting research positions.
Wisconsin and Illinois experienced budgetary pressures affecting certain institutions. Universities compensated by hiring more contract faculty and attracting private funding oriented toward short-term applied research.
The result is a profound transformation of what these universities produce. Basic research recedes in this funding environment. Departments of humanities and social sciences, pure mathematics, theoretical physics, resist poorly against this funding bias. The public universities concerned become less oriented toward research with no immediate applicative horizon, and more dependent on short-term funding.
The American trajectory interests Latin American rectors not through mimicry, but because it charts the endpoint of a similar mechanism fifteen years ahead. The stakes are comparable to those of education financing in Europe: when public resources decline, it is the most well-off families who compensate, and inequalities in access to advanced training widen.
Where the Point of No Return Lies
Recent work in university policy raises, without fully answering, the question of the threshold: prolonged budgetary erosion risks reducing university autonomy in defining training.
Prolonged budgetary erosion risks reducing university autonomy. A university that can no longer maintain its research equipment may become dependent on private companies for access to instruments. A university whose salaries no longer allow it to retain locally trained doctorates becomes dependent on researchers trained elsewhere. A university funded by external partners may see its research directions influenced by their priorities.
None of these shifts resembles a decision. They arrive through accumulation, like the Peruvian laboratory closures. And this is precisely what makes them difficult to counter politically: there is no vote to reverse, no cut to restore, no minister to question about a decision he did not make.
Countries that have begun correcting this mechanism have generally chosen to replace inflation indexation with indexation to a basket of real costs specific to universities. Finland applied a university index based on multiple costs; Germany planned a fixed annual increase of 3 percent in its federal funding. These examples remain little cited in Latin American budgetary debates, but they show that a technical solution exists.
Government Decision-Making Margins
Several public universities in Latin America have begun mapping their own erosion, which is in itself a first step. Several Colombian universities have begun producing reports detailing the erosion of their allocations. In Peru, universities have launched audits of their research infrastructure. These transparency exercises make the mechanism visible, which inflation indexation had precisely helped conceal.
Concrete proposals circulating in the region’s education ministries turn on three levers. The first is differentiated indexation: creating a university cost index separate from the consumer price index, calculated on institutions’ actual expenditures. The second is sanctuarizing permanent research positions in budget negotiations, separating training expenses from research expenses accounting-wise to prevent the former from absorbing the latter during trade-offs. The third is pooling expensive equipment among several public universities in the same region, reducing the unit cost of maintenance.
These levers require reorganization rather than massive immediate investment. These levers require explicit political decision, which inflation indexation had allowed to avoid. It may be the most precious thing these Colombian, Peruvian, and American data offer to policymakers who want to act: the possibility of naming precisely what is happening, before reaching the point where naming no longer suffices.
Sources
- UNESCO/CEPAL, Higher Education in Latin America 2026 (main report)
- National surveys on public universities in Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, 2025-2026 (cited in UNESCO/CEPAL 2026 report)
- TIAA Institute, Higher Education Finance Survey 2026 (Wisconsin and Illinois data)
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Annual University Financing Report 2023-2024
- Statistisches Bundesamt, comparative data on higher education financing in Germany, 2026
