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Uruguay The Education System
Primary education in Uruguay was free and compulsory;
it
encompassed six years of instruction. The number of
primary
schools in 1987 was 2,382, including 240 private schools.
There
were 16,568 primary school teachers and 354,177 primary
school
students. This resulted in a pupil-teacher ratio of
approximately
twenty-one to one in 1987, compared with about thirty to
one in
1970. Boys and girls were enrolled in almost equal
numbers.
General education in secondary schools encompassed six
years
of instruction divided into two three-year cycles. The
first, or
basic, cycle was compulsory; the second cycle was geared
to
university preparation. In addition to the academic track,
public
technical education schools provided secondary school
education
that was technical and vocational in nature. The two
systems were
parallel in structure, and there was little provision for
transfer between the two. All sectors of society
traditionally
tended to prefer the academic course of study, which was
regarded
as more prestigious. As a result, academic secondary
education
had expanded more rapidly than technical education in the
second
half of the twentieth century. In 1987 there were 276
general
secondary schools in Uruguay, including 118 private
schools.
However, the public high schools were much larger, so that
in
1987 they actually contained 145,083 of the country's
175,710
secondary school students enrolled in both day classes and
night
classes. In addition, ninety-four technical education
schools had
a total enrollment of 52,766 students in 1987. Male and
female
enrollment at the secondary level was roughly equal, but
females
slightly outnumbered males overall (constituting, for
example, 53
percent of the secondary school student body in 1982). It
appeared that females were in the majority in the basic
cycle but
were very slightly outnumbered by males in the university
preparatory cycle.
Uruguay had only one public university, the University
of the
Republic (also known as the University of Montevideo),
founded in
1849, and only one private university, the Catholic
University of
Uruguay, established in 1984 and also in Montevideo.
Education at
the University of the Republic was free and, in general,
open to
all those possessing a bachillerato, or certificate
awarded for completion of both cycles of general secondary
education. Despite the free tuition, however, access to a
university education tended to be limited to children of
middleand upper-income families because the need to supplement
the
family income by working, coupled with the expense of
books and
other fees, placed a university education out of the reach
of
many. Moreover, the fact that the only public university
was in
Montevideo severely limited the ability of those in the
interior
to attend university unless their families were relatively
well
off financially. In 1988 about 69 percent of university
students
were from Montevideo.
The number of university students continued to grow
rapidly,
from nearly 22,000 in 1970 to over 61,000 in 1988. Of that
total,
women accounted for about 58 percent. Most courses of
study were
intended to last from four to six years, but the average
time
spent at university by a successful student was usually
considerably longer. As in the rest of Latin America,
maintaining
the status of student had various advantages, such as
reduced
fares on buses and subsidized canteens. This was one
reason that
the student population was so large yet the number of
graduates
relatively low. In 1986 only 3,654 students (2,188 women
and
1,455 men) graduated from university, whereas 16,878
entered that
year. Uruguayans exhibited a strong preference for the
disciplines and professions they deemed prestigious, such
as law,
social science, engineering, medicine, economics, and
administration.
Observers continued to note the discrepancy between
university training and job opportunities, particularly in
the
prestigious fields. This gap contributed to the
substantial level
of emigration of the best-educated young Uruguayan
professionals
(see Emigration
, this ch.).
Data as of December 1990
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