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Argentina

Education system in Argentina

After independence, Argentina constructed a national public education system in comparison to other nations, placing the country high up in the global rankings of literacy. Today the country has a literacy rate of 97% and three in eight adults over age 20 have completed secondary school studies or higher.
The ubiquitous white uniform of Argentine school children; it is a national symbol of learning.

School attendance is compulsory between the ages of 5 and 17. The Argentine school system consists of a primary or lower school level lasting six or seven years, and a secondary or high school level lasting between five to six years. In the 1990s, the system was split into different types of high school instruction, called Educacion Secundaria and the Polimodal. Some provinces adopted the Polimodal while others did not. A project in the Executive to repeal this measure and return to a more traditional secondary level system was approved in 2006. President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento is overwhelmingly credited in pushing and implementing a free, modern education system in Argentina. The 1918 University reform shaped the current tripartite representation of most public universities.

Education is funded by tax payers at all levels except for the majority of graduate studies. There are many private school institutions in the primary, secondary and university levels. Around 11.4 million people were enrolled in formal education of some kind in 2005.

Public education in Argentina is tuition-free from the primary to the university levels. Though literacy was nearly universal as early as 1947, the majority of Argentine youth had little access to education beyond the compulsory seven years of grade school during the first half of the 20th century; since then, when the tuition-free system was extended to the secondary and university levels, demand for these facilities has often outstripped budgets (particularly since the 1970s). Consequently, public education is now widely found wanting and in decline; this has helped private education flourish, though it has also caused a marked inequity between those who can afford it (usually the middle and upper classes) and the rest of society, as private schools often have no scholarship systems in place. Roughly one in four primary and secondary students and one in six university students attend private institutions.

There are thirty-eight public universities across the country, as well as numerous private ones. The Universities of Buenos Aires (the largest one, with 300,000 students), Córdoba (110,000 students and one of the oldest in the continent), La Plata (90,000 students), Rosario (75,000 students) and the National Technological University (70,000 students) are among the most important. Public universities faced cutbacks in spending during the 1980s and 1990s, which led to a decline in overall quality.