Uruguay: Uruguay Education Profile

Education at public institutions, inclunding those at the college level, is free. Primary education is compulsory. Uruguay has virtually eliminated illiteracy. Academic education is highly valued, and a lot of additional persons are trained in the professions than are needed, while critical personnel shortages exist in technical and vocational trades. The University of the Republic, founded in 1849, is in Montevideo. The Artigas Institute for Professors (1949) is a college-level institution for the training of secondary-school teachers.

Adult illiteracy for the year 2000 was estimated at 2.2% (males, 2.6% and females, 1.8%), part the lowest in Latin America. Education in elementary, secondary, and technical schools and at the University of the Republic in Montevideo is free. Elementary education, which lasts six years, is compulsory. Secondary education is in two stages of three years. As of 1999, public spending on education was estimated at 2.5% of GDP.

In 1996 there were 2,415 primary schools, with 16,868 teachers and 345,573 students. Student-to-teacher ratio stood at 20 to 1, where it remained as of 1999. There were 269,826 students in secondary schools in 1996. As of 1999, 94% of primary-school-age children were enrolled in school, while 77% of those eligible attended secondary school.

There are two major universities, one of which is national run, the University of the Republic, and one is private, the Catholic University. The institutions of higher learning had a total of 9,907 teachers and 79,691 students in 1996.

Modern infrastructure exists in principle, but needs modernization despite significant recent evolution in a number of fields, particularly primary and secondary education. In these sectors solid and differentiated institutions exist, but had suffered severely from budget cuts, lack of discipline and reduced efficiency in the decades before 2005. The Vázquez years, in contrast, have been characterized by a strong expansion of educational investment . Between 2004 and 2009, public spending on education almost doubled (from 16.6 billion to 30 billion pesos at constant prices) and is expected to all to 4.5% of GDP in 2009.

In this year, Uruguay will be the initial country in the world to provide a personal laptop for each child in school (Plan Ceibal). Infrastructural, anti-poverty, social and educational policies for children will be further coordinated and extended within the framework of the ambitious and demanding 2010 – 2030 national strategy for childhood and adolescence (ENIA), which was launched in 2008. The traditional, still overwhelmingly public tertiary sector is underfunded and lacks sufficiently professionalized M.A. and Ph.D. programs in a lot of areas, and is not from presently on internationally competitive despite some recent evolution.

This is particularly authentic for the institutions of advanced studies and R&D, where the impact of the catastrophic scientific brain drain triggered by the military regime is still being felt. However, the development of new curricula, individual reforms and a debate over the needs and shape of educational reform have begun to bear fruit. Competition from private universities is being felt. According to the UNDP, public spending on education in 2002 – 2005 was 2.6% of GDP (or 7.9% of total spending). One of the weakest points of Uruguayan policy performance is a very low R&D spending, totaling less than 0.3% of GDP between 2000 and 2005.