Students from Rural and Urban Areas and Their Entry to the University

Abstract

The aim of this research is to understand the general context of higher education students in both rural and urban areas of Oaxaca. The theoretical basis is constructivism, because it takes into account the individual’s environment for the development of learning. It is a research work whose method consists of a bibliographic review and descriptive statistics on socio-demographic and educational variables. Its value lies in the visualization of the difficulties that persist among young people just entering university and the lack of physical and technological school infrastructure as well as the socio-economic conditions in which the students live. The results provide evidence of the gap in access to higher education between the rural and urban population as a result of the lack of public government investment in the educational, social and digital areas. Less than half of the households have access to information and communication technologies, which significantly hinder their university education. These aspects invite urgent and necessary international reflection on the forms of governance in higher education, which is not limited to the Mexican context.

1. Introduction

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) commits all countries to ensure equitable access to quality and affordable education by 2030. In particular, goal 4.3 states, ensure equitable access for all women and men to quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university. This means that education systems must be directed in such a way as to enable the achievement of this goal.

In this sense, the structure and governance of education systems at the international level directly and indirectly influence their capacity to provide quality education, understood as: equitable, inclusive, pertinent, innovative, diversified and with broad coverage, as well as to develop the competencies of graduates and their relevance in the labor market.

After the events derived from the sanitary contingency (COVID-19), the environment in which universities develop is complex and uncertain. This reality requires new organizational changes that allow them to respond correctly to the expectations of society and to the cultural, environmental, technological, political and economic trends that emerge both locally and globally.

It is in the midst of this scenario where governance becomes a critical factor, which justifies the research of studies that address university governance practices and actions that have an impact on it.

Under the new current context, it is through the review of information and data analysis that there is an opportunity to improve university administration, taking advantage of the use of information technologies, combating inefficiencies and partially replacing traditional systems under excessively bureaucratized management models.

Therefore, this chapter addresses the need to contribute and address the need to improve university governance in view of the existence of different gaps to be addressed and major contributions to be made. Consider the premise that higher education institution (particularly universities) constitutes a central actor for the growth and development processes of countries.

In Mexico, it is difficult to obtain information and data on the number of indigenous students attending the education system, especially at the higher education level. This has not been considered relevant or desirable, because to recognize and show such information would imply, on the one hand, evidence of discrimination against young people, especially those who live in rural areas, and, on the other, a lack of interest on the part of the state in addressing this problem. Access to higher education is still unequal due to different factors; however, the outstanding element is that of socio-economic status, those with low socio-economic status are unlikely to attend university and those who manage to enroll are likely to drop out for academic or financial reasons.

The Ministry of Public Education (SEP), National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have corroborated that students from rural and especially indigenous areas have the lowest levels of participation in higher education; in general, students who live in a rural and marginalized community have greater limitations in terms of knowledge. Those living in rural areas find it difficult to enter the education system at a higher education level, even though public education and governments have set out to reach all sectors of the population, the entry and retention rate of students from economically and culturally marginalized group’s remains low, and completing a bachelor’s degree is a great challenge, a feat.

Knowing the educational condition becomes fundamental, especially when it is known that the intention of the population to study a university degree is directly related to the socio-economic situation in which they find themselves, therefore, the objective of this research is to know the general context of higher education students considering the criteria of rural and urban areas of Oaxaca, based on the review of the databases of INEGI and SEP, mainly on socio-demographic and educational variables.

In Oaxaca, according to the latest Population Census, 11.8% of people aged 15 and over are illiterate; 45.2% have incomplete basic education [1]. Regarding the school population in Higher Education, the National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions (ANUIES) indicates that during the 2019–2020 school year, the total enrolment corresponds to 82,040 students, while for the 2020–2021 school year it is 82,524 people.

Particularly, in the case of new students, from 24,255 to 22,598, respectively, if we disaggregate the information at the rural level under the criterion of indigenous language speakers, the total enrolment of new entrants goes from 1545 to 1536 students; the data give evidence of a reduction of the newly enrolled university student population in the entity, a relevant aspect since it is directly related to socio-economic factors that the rural population is constantly facing and which were deepened during the pandemic. The new teaching-learning dynamic was virtual, forcing students at all levels to rely on information and communication technologies regardless of their socio-economic conditions.

The theoretical basis that sustains this research is constructivism due to the requirement in the consideration of reality (of the individual and the group) for the development of education. Finally, the discussion of the topic and the conclusions are noted.

2. Constructivism: definition and background

Education in ancient times consisted of individuals possessing the knowledge necessary for survival, daily activities, values and social constraints; this knowledge was accumulated and treasured as it was passed on to new generations, initially through oral traditions and later through documents. Nowadays, this acquired knowledge is already part of the available cultural annals [2], so the school is the space where knowledge is transmitted to new generations, without leaving aside family and cultural learning, leaving the generation of new specialized knowledge to researchers.

In the traditional school, repetition and memorization were privileged, especially in information that was believed to be fundamental, such as the multiplication tables and spelling rules, names of characters, cities. Under this method, it was easy to assess students: you either know or you do not know. It is now recognized that the ideal of education is no longer the memorization of content, but in some ways it is understood that this was the case, blackboards were used and not notebooks where information could be stored and reviewed, nor was there access to sources of information, today we have access to the internet and the ease of consultation that devices allow is impressive.

At least three sources of constructivism can be traced [3]: philosophical, psychological and pedagogical. From philosophy, the gnoseological explanation is very broad, but we could situate the beginning with Kant [4], when he posed the epistemological questions of his Critique of Pure Reason. In the field of psychology, it begins with Piaget when he assumes that one knowledge gives rise to another that is increasingly more elaborate and complex. In the field of pedagogy, it begins with the active pedagogy of Montessori, Decroly, Pestalozzi, Freinet, Dewey who defend the role of activity in the learning process. Vigotsky and Ausebel affirm that knowledge has to be contextualized, taking into account the social, biological and economic environment, among others.

Constructivism defends the idea that the individual, in both cognitive and affective aspects, as well as in semiotic aspects, is not an accident or a socio-cultural determination, nor is it a genetic biological predetermination. It is a personal elaboration that is produced throughout life by various basic factors such as heredity, environment, one’s own experiences and language.

2.1 Reference authors of constructivism

In relation to the in-depth work on authors, currents and discrepancies of constructivism, it is a debate that to date has not been closed, and this is because it is not a finished theory, but it is regularly broadened and deepened. We will mention some of them in relation to the framework of the research.

Piaget defended that between subject and object, there is always dynamicity, that is to say, that the person, when confronted with phenomena, is not uncritically, but interprets and reconstructs it with his own abilities and the knowledge he possesses; the new knowledge goes beyond the previously acquired knowledge.

Piaget’s [5] proposal about cognitive development is also known as genetic epistemology or psychogenetic, because in this explanatory search about how human beings acquire knowledge he understands the infant as a person in growth and maturation. He explains that the human mind is part of a never-ending process of adaptation of organic life to its environment, which begins in biology and ends in thought.

Is it that the subject constructs his knowledge? We start from the assumption that the human being has capacities from birth, totally linked to evolutionary and genetic development, the next step is that the individual moves on to more complex knowledge and interpretations from his initial knowledge, and the third step is the interaction with the environment. Each new knowledge brings these three steps into play.

Piaget [5] calls cognitive conflict when the individual analyzes the knowledge he already possesses because it seems unsatisfactory to him, so he launches himself in search of explanations that satisfy him more. The teacher will make this cognitive conflict possible from the knowledge of the context of his students, generating questions to the knowledge they have in order to generate more complex answers and correlations. Unlike traditional teaching, constructivism does not focus its efforts on the fulfillment of the content, but on the change that the student generates in his or her own worldview.

For Pérez and de Carvalho [6], Piaget suffers from not considering academic content and also the social relationship as interaction with other individuals, because he focused to a large extent (although not exclusively) on the solitary epistemic subject interacting with the environment; but Piaget was very aware of this, we learn from the family, from peers, from the media, from educational experiences such as schooling (for students) or professional development (for their teachers).

Ausubel focused specifically on what is known as meaningful learning. Indeed, the subject generates mental representations of his experience and mental processes, i.e., he generates meanings. Content can be repeated without a clear understanding of its meaning (as when a child says a bad word without understanding what he is saying, or as when someone learns mathematical tables by repetition, but there is no understanding of the content, and this knowledge is not meaningful). When the knowledge is meaningful, then the individual can apply the knowledge learned. The process is to learn, to know, to understand the meaning; and to achieve this requires motivation, generation of the need for knowledge and desire to know.

Ausubel recognizes learning by discovery and meaningful learning: The individual discovers on his own phenomena of reality and thought and incorporates them into his arsenal of knowledge ready to be used, then the significant happens, and the subject manages to correlate this knowledge and link it with the one he has previously, being able to link it allows him to give it meaning and application. On the contrary, learning by heart is not meaningful learning [7].

Vygotsky emphasizes the cultural aspect and the importance of joint and cooperative activity. Learning goes hand in hand from the beginning of human life and brings into play all psychological functions, as well as cultural ones (formal and informal). Knowledge is humanized and defined by the moment of maturation of the subject and learning gives him/her the possibility of generating his/her own internal processes of knowledge but always contextualized in his/her cultural environment. For this author, educational development will always consider culture as the place where knowledge is generated and developed [8].

Vygotsky was a contemporary of Piaget, and he examined some of the same basic questions about how humans arrive at knowledge in a complementary way. If one assumption of Piaget’s programmer was the centrality of an individual epistemic subject, Vygotsky now included a fundamental assumption that the knowledge of a person living in a human community will be derived largely from interactions, through which aspects of culture are acquired [9].

Co-relationships between individuals in their community will develop all cognitive aspects. These correlations are not only vertical, parent-child, teacher-student, but horizontal (all information acquired through peers). Therefore, if the right tools are provided, the individual will be able to develop his or her potential beyond what could be expected without such tools. Now, the zone of proximal development is that threshold between the fact of how the individual solves a problem and the possibility of solving such a problem with new knowledge that can be acquired thanks to the supervision of other people with more training, not always a teacher, and in many occasions, it can be a peer who teaches new ways of solving such a situation. Therefore, the zone of proximal development will expand the more interactions a subject has with other individuals, with his or her natural and cultural environment, developing qualitatively more complex constructs.

Vygotsky [9] places others as part of the environment that the individual has to recognize and learn as a socio-cultural experience. In such a way, learning cannot be individual, but relational. The individual can solve more complex problems in a group than he or she would solve alone. On the other hand, he suggested that there were two origins for concepts [10], that we construct our own informal concepts spontaneously, without initially being able to operate with them effectively or having a language to talk about them; and that we also learn about scientific or academic concepts [11]. We might think of the first type of concepts as those acquired through types of action in the environment, based on the inherent pattern-recognition qualities of the human cognitive apparatus.

Piaget’s model would suggest that these spontaneous concepts would have the potential to become formal tools for conscious thought through the processes of cognitive development. Vygotsky focused on how, under normal circumstances, the individual exists in a social and cultural context, where individuals’ personal concepts are modified by interactions with others, to enable the development of a common language. That is, although each individual has to construct his or her own conceptual frameworks, these are moderated by interactions with others.

Thus, he had the intuition to appreciate that academic concepts in formal education, although pre-packaged in linguistic and logical forms, are not automatically available to the learner. In other words, he seems to have appreciated the notion of rote learning, and realized that concepts cannot be copied seamlessly from one mind to another, since meaningful concepts are those that are embedded in frameworks of understanding. In Vygotsky’s model, the process of cognitive development is the gradual linking of personal concepts (largely implicit, spontaneous) with academic-formal concepts (but initially isolated and non-functional).

Summarizing, we can now point out some general characteristics of constructivism:

• Knowledge, as is already known, is not innate but neither is it acquired through experience alone, but is constructed according to the subject, from his own reality and communication with his origins, with his community, with his world. No person starts from scratch in education and even less so at university; people acquire new concepts and elaborate them in such a way that the new knowledge is compared and contrasted with what they already know. They attach it to it or unattach it, and readjust it to their structures.

• The capacity for knowledge construction developed by the learner is the basic subject of learning. This process brings into play the individual as a whole, according to some psychological explanations. Although Piaget himself did not give it that name, he refers to the individual as a whole. On this path, the learner modifies what he or she already possesses and interprets it anew, so that he or she can integrate it and make it his or her own.

What a student will understand from teaching will depend on their existing ideas and ways of thinking about a subject, teachers have to diagnose students’ thinking effectively, so that they can channel that thinking into the target knowledge presented in the curriculum [12]. Where teaching is not designed to build closely on a learner’s current state of knowledge, a number of things can go wrong: misinterpretations, failures to make the expected links, creating inappropriate links [13].

• As a product of these connections individuals generate new schemas and as part of new outcomes, their everyday practice is influenced. The generation of new concepts is reflected upon and a new attitude toward what is understood by the world is generated. This knowledge is not stored in the form of a bank, in a summative form or as a simple accumulation of learning experiences.

• The dynamism of this process implies that progress is not always ascending or linear, sometimes there are difficulties, and even mistakes that make us rethink what we have learnt.

2.2 Regarding university education

Pedagogical theories, for the most part, have focused on the analysis of learning in childhood and pedagogy in higher education has been neglected, with the idea that students are adults, committed to their own development and with the appropriate disposition for university challenges. Concern for the life of the individual, away from academics, was for institutions virtually irrelevant.

Nowadays, universities have realized the importance of accompanying students, and most of them now have offices for psychology, student support, academic-educational guidance, tutoring, general and preventive medicine, among others. This represents a great advance in the consideration of the student as a person.

This means that, with regard to this research, students from different regions of the state of Oaxaca have a very rich sense of experiences and culture that directly influence their university education and development. In the case of students coming from rural areas, they gradually integrate new university knowledge into their worldview while enriching the group, and by linking it with what they already know, they generate new points of view, on many occasions more than other students from urban areas, since they have not had to adapt to a new culture, while they have.

3. Geographical context and reality of higher education in Oaxaca

Currently, students from small towns and rural areas have more opportunities to enter higher education due to the increase in educational offerings; however, providing quality education to all continues to be a challenge, mainly due to the difficulty in obtaining sufficient public funding. Oaxaca is not exempt from this situation, which is shown in this section.

To find your way around, Oaxaca is located in the southern part of the Mexican Republic. Fifteen major ethnic groups (with different ethno-linguistics) out of the 56 that exist in Mexico can be identified in the state. According to the latest Population and Housing Census, a total of 4,132,148 people live in Oaxaca, of which 47.8% are men and 52.2% are women. The age composition shows that 43.9% are aged 0–19, 33.1% are aged 20–49, and 23% are aged 50 and over [1]; a large part of the population is young and will demand access to university education in the medium term.

In terms of territorial and administrative distribution of the population, there are eight regions grouping 570 municipalities with a total of 10,723 localities, of which 10,523 are considered rural areas (concentrating 2,088,575 inhabitants) and 190 urban areas (with 2,043,573 people). According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), when a population has less than 2500 inhabitants, it is considered rural, while urban areas have more than 2500 inhabitants.

Two elements are associated with this distribution: the geographical conditions of the state and the ethnic plurality of the population and therefore the large number of languages spoken. Official sources indicate that 31.2% of the population aged three and over speaks an indigenous language (1,221,555 Oaxacans), of which 67.5% live in rural areas and the remaining 32.5% live in urban areas [1].

When reviewing the records of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, in order to know the conditions in which Oaxacans live, it is found that up to 2020, 61.7% of people live in poverty, while 20.6% live in extreme poverty, mostly in rural areas [14]. To clarify the concept used, according to CONEVAL, a person is in a situation of multidimensional poverty when they are not guaranteed the exercise of at least one of their rights for social development, and their income is insufficient to acquire the goods and services they require to satisfy their needs.

A person is in a situation of extreme poverty when the exercise of three or more of their rights to social development is not guaranteed (they have three or more deprivations, out of a possible six, within the Index of Social Deprivation) and, in addition, they are below the extreme poverty line by income. The latter means that if they were to use all the household’s disposable income they would not be able to acquire the food basket [14].

The Social Gap Index is defined as a weighted measure that summarizes four indicators of social deprivation (education, health, basic services and quality and space in housing) with the purpose of ordering the units of observation according to their social deprivation. In relation to the above, when investigating this index in Oaxaca, it reveals a very high level, 2.41 and 2.59 in 2010 and 2020, respectively, being the second most socially deprived at the national level; that is, it is an entity in which the population lacks essential aspects for a decent life.

Table 1 shows a set of indicators of social backwardness and the percentage of the population corresponding to each one of them. In terms of education, it can be seen that there is no significant progress between 2010 and 2020 in the number of people aged 6–14 who do not attend school. Similarly, in 1 decade, the illiterate population aged 15 years and over was reduced by only four percentage points.

Indicators	Percent of population (2010)	Percent of population (2020)
Illiterate population 15 years old and over	16.27	11.8
Population aged 6 to 14 years not attending school	5.64	5.8
Population 15 years of age and older with incomplete basic education	57.8	45.2
Population not entitled to health services	43.08	29.4
Homes that do not have piped water from the public water supply	30.1	9.8
Housing without drainage	28.35	19.4
Housing without electricity	5.23	2.3

Table 1.

Some indicators of social backwardness in Oaxaca.

Source: with data from INEGI [1] and CONEVAL [14].

As of 2020, the average level of schooling in the state corresponds to 8.1 years, a figure below the national average (9.7 years), that is, each Oaxacan attends, on average, up to the second grade of secondary school at the basic level of education. In the case of rural localities, the data show that few people attend an educational institution. Table 2 shows that of the total number of people aged three and over, only a quarter (28.8%) attend school, while 71.2% do not, mostly women.

	Population 3 years and older	Percentage attending	Percentage not attending	Percentage not specified
Total	1,971,297	28.74	71.21	0.03
Men	948,772	29.88	70.07	0.04
Women	1,022,525	27.69	72.28	0.02

Table 2.

Rural population attending school.

Source: with data from INEGI [1].

Taking into account that access to education is one of the main mechanisms to reduce the growth of poverty and socio-economic inequality, it is clear that literacy among the rural population represents one of the great challenges in the entity since, as mentioned before, a large part of this population lives in conditions of poverty and extreme poverty.

With special interest, in reference to and based on information from the statistical yearbooks of the National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions (ANUIES), we observe in Table 3 that during the 2019–2020 school year the total enrolment corresponds to 82,040 students, while for the 2020–2021 cycle it is 82,524 people. For 2021–2022 it increased to 84,190.

	School year; 2019–2020	School year; 2020–2021	School year 2021–2022
Total enrollment	82,040	82,524	84,190
Women	53.17%	54.42%	55.49%
Men	46.83%	45.58%	44.51%
Total enrollment SIL*	5269	5290	6503
Women SIL	53.67%	54.38%	57.53%
Men SIL	46.33%	45.61%	42.47%
New total revenue	24,255	22,598	23,977
Women	53.47%	54.60%	55.45%
Men	46.53%	45.40%	44.55%
New total revenue SIL	1545	1536	2064
Total titulades	9353	7028	7504
Women	57.84%	57.67%	59.76%
Men	42.15%	42.33%	40.23%
Total titulades SIL	843	400	505
Total graduates	14,878	13,096	13,303
Women	56.04%	55.80%	57.80%
Men	43.96%	44.20%	42.19%
Total graduates SIL	918	627	864

Table 3.

School population in higher education in Oaxaca.

*

SIL: Speakers of Indigenous Language.

Source: with data from ANUIES [15].

Particularly, in the case of new entrants, from 24,255 it went to 22,598, and increased to 23,977, in 2021–2022. The same is true for the disaggregated level of indigenous language speakers and other indicators (graduates and graduates).

Given these circumstances, it is relevant to review general information related to the number of higher education students in rural and urban localities, as well as the context of households in relation to access to information and communication technology tools and some characteristics of the dwellings they live in. This information is then cross-checked in a particular case study.

Table 4 shows that the rural population aged 15 years and over corresponds to 1,457,312 persons, of whom only 5% are enrolled in a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, which means that one inhabitant out of 20 attends university; the figure is even smaller in the case of postgraduate studies.

Higher education rural population						Not specified
Population 15 years and older	Undergraduate1				Postgraduate2
	Total students	1 to 3 degrees (%)	4 or more grades (%)	Not specified (%)
	72,960	28.48	71.39	0.12	4765	2773
Men	34,573	28.06	71.76	0.17	2333	1414
Women	38,387	28.85	71.06	0.07	2432	1359

Table 4.

Rural population 15 years of age in higher education.

¹

Includes the population that has at least one approved degree in higher education.

²

Includes the population with at least one approved degree in a specialty, master’s or doctoral program.

Source: with data from INEGI [1].

Out of a total of 1,517,358 people aged 15 and over living in urban localities, 20% go to university, that is, one in five. Only 26,510 people have a postgraduate degree (Table 5).

Higher education urban population						Not specified
Population 15 years and older	Undergraduate1				Postgraduate2
	Total students	1 to 3 degrees (%)	4 or more grades (%)	Not specified (%)
	296,151	23.18	76.74	0.07	26,510	3777
Men	142,039	23.04	76.86	0.09	13,323	1910
Women	154,112	23.31	76.62	0.05	13,187	1867

Table 5.

Urban population 15 years of age and older in higher education.

¹

Includes the population that has at least one approved degree in higher education.

²

Includes the population with at least one approved degree in a specialty, master or doctoral program.

Source: with data from INEGI [1].

According to the General Directorate of Indigenous Education of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP, n.d.a.) very little has been done to meet the needs of this sector of the population. The National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions [15] has made some attempts to address the problem of coverage of indigenous students through the implementation of different programmers in coordination with companies and international organizations.

Coverage data indicate that the educational offer, especially at the undergraduate level, is insufficient for the total number of young people of the age to study a professional career in these entities. This has to do with the issue of poverty; young people’s priority is to solve the problem of finding a way to satisfy their basic needs, which is why they go to the United States or to other entities; studying a professional career is not an option, especially where there are no spaces or opportunities to do so. This socio-economic condition (poverty) has to do with the fact that more and more indigenous young people are deciding to study in teacher training colleges, in such a way that it has led to generate a dynamic of conflict and debate at state and national level—not questionable in this text—but which must be taken into account.

With regard to the information and communication technologies (ICTs) available to Oaxacan households, Table 6 shows that in rural localities, 8.8% of households reported having a computer, laptop or tablet; 15% have internet access; and 57% have a mobile phone. On the other hand, 32% of households located in urban areas have a computer, tablet or laptop; less than half have internet service (44%) and 88% have a mobile phone, so that the tools needed today to face the current academic context are lacking, insufficient and complex.

Size of locality	Goods and information and communication technologies	Inhabited private dwellings			Occupants of inhabited private dwellings
		Total	Availability of goods and information and communication technologies (% households)		Total	Availability of goods and information and communication technologies (% households)
			Available	Not available		Available	Not available
Rural
	Computer, laptop or tablet	560,008	8.83	90.92	2,071,243	9.40	90.36
	Internet		15.01	84.73		16.28	83.48
	Cell phone		56.88	42.87		60.95	38.82
Urban
	Computer, laptop or tablet	561,838	31.95	67.77	2,029,911	33.01	66.71
	Internet		43.74	55.97		45.57	54.15
	Cell phone		87.88	11.84		90.17	9.55

Table 6.

Access to ICT’s.

Source: with data from INEGI [1].

Among the factors that influence students’ academic performance are those related to the conditions of the space and environment in which they live. In this case, the data reveal that 76% of rural homes have dirt floors, 15% have no electricity, 55% have no piped water and 14% have no sanitation or drainage. Of the dwellings located in urban areas, just over half (58%) have dirt floors, 7% have no electricity, 44% have no piped water and 7% have neither drainage nor sanitation.

In general, it is clear that conditions are not ideal, even in urban areas. The Oaxacan population faces a lack of infrastructure, a factor that influences the academic performance of students at all levels of schooling.

In this sense, having knowledge of the realities of the university students’ environment is a determining factor in learning and academic training; in the case of the state of Oaxaca, data reveal disparities in access to higher education between rural and urban inhabitants. García, Sánches y Govea [8] argues that the teacher could facilitate student learning through different elements, for example, knowing in depth their characteristics, problems and interests. It is through constructivism that the idea is defended that the individual, in both cognitive and affective aspects, as well as in symbolic representational aspects, is not a mere product of the socio-cultural environment, nor a simple result of internal dispositions of a biological nature. It is a personal elaboration that is produced throughout life by various basic factors such as heredity, the environment, one’s own experiences and language.

4. Conclusion

The results provide a sample on the panorama of governance in higher education, a structure of the educational level, a profile of the inequality of opportunity gaps, as well as the economic investment made by governments in relation to regulation, financing, information and organization in the higher education system. This situation is not limited to the Mexican context, but at the international level it is essential to investigate.

Socio-economic, socio-cultural and socio-technological factors were briefly identified. Perceived as multifactorial, they require institutions to adapt to the challenge of internationalization and to adapt to changes and transformations in teaching and governance.

The data show and confirm the above data show the gap that exists in terms of access to higher education in rural and urban areas in Oaxaca. The opportunities to go to university are less for those who live in rural areas, considering that the population distribution in the state is similar by the type of locality. Technological facilities remain within the big cities, and internet service and therefore access to interconnectivity are still extremely limited, which generate an involuntary delay in the acquisition and development of knowledge.

Technological devices continue to be difficult to access for communities far from urban areas; therefore, knowledge ceases to be meaningful in terms of constructivism and local knowledge is reproduced with the delay that this entails with respect to urban areas.

The review of information and the use and analysis of existing data constitute a first approach to discovering areas of opportunity to improve university governance, taking advantage of the use of information technologies, which will subsequently allow combating inefficiencies and partially replacing traditional systems under excessively bureaucratized management models, such as the Mexican educational system.

An effective higher education system helps students to develop knowledge and skills relevant to their environment so that they can achieve good results and expand their employment opportunities. Despite the initiatives undertaken to guarantee higher education throughout the Mexican system, there are still no mechanisms in place to guarantee minimum quality.

The role of the state in directing higher education is somewhat limited due to the insufficient regulatory framework, the high degree of autonomy of some subsystems, the involvement of multiple agencies and the need for coordination with state governments. In the case of Mexico, the federal and state governments share responsibility for governing, regulating and coordinating higher education. However, there is a lack of coordination between the different orders of government causing fragmentation that translates into results such as those shown here.

From what has been developed in this text, we conclude that there is an urgent need to end the inequality gaps, to generate more educational spaces and more opportunities—to pursue a professional career—for young people in Oaxaca, to begin to design strategies and policies appropriate to the needs of their communities, and to design and implement educational programs based on their worldviews and social principles, from which they regulate time, space and daily practices.

It is important and necessary to build a local-regional scheme that accepts cultural differences, with a humanistic character. One seeks to integrate multicultural models, value diversity and promote equality; whose teaching-learning method is collaborative and strengthens the development of self-esteem and communication, allowing indigenous student groups to explore their own values, perspectives and scope. On the contrary, in a context where higher education is increasingly privatized, these groups of indigenous youth face discrimination and social exclusion.

What would be the benefits of this new specialized educational scheme? It creates an environment of greater trust and interaction between students, a complete integral education according to the needs of the space. It broadens the opportunities for access to higher education. Thus, it is essential to have a long-term vision where education is seen as an investment and not as an expense.

This chapter is just an approach to the situations related to rural and urban students and their environment during their academic training at higher education level. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Manual for Measuring Equity in Education identifies five sets of educational indicators used to measure inequality [16] covering access and participation, completion, learning, attainment and resources. However, these data are not disaggregated by equity groups (women, students with disabilities, ethnic minorities, refugees, etc.) or by students’ economic status. In that sense, the only higher education specific dataset that seems to be available is the US Higher Education Equity Indicators [17].

It is necessary and important to generate studies that establish links between governance aspects of higher education systems and the SDG4 targets to increase quality and equity. Such data are expected to be collected at the national level in many countries, but are currently not aggregated. This is not an easy task, as certain groups are specific to particular settings, just as who exactly comprises those groups may also be country and region specific [18]. However, this would be an important area to address.

According to Ganga and Nuñez [19], the new governance must promote good governance, which grants appropriate funding to higher education institutions; and foster transparency, social involvement, critical thinking, permanent reflection and linkage capacity. These elements—following these authors—sustain the essence of university system governance, given that they provide a source of knowledge about structure, functioning and interrelationships, goals, objectives that guarantee its effectiveness.

The capacity of the governance of the higher education system to have an impact in the current context faced by universities is determined by the real possibility that governments have (inside and outside higher education institutions) and by the capacity for action of the different exchange networks with strategic agents and actors. The meaning of governance should not be overlooked as the set of regulation and coordination processes oriented toward welfare, which help to solve social problems.

As central actors, universities are expected to adapt as quickly as possible to external changes, to be flexible when meeting external demands. For them, the professionalization and orientation of the multiple agents involved in university governance and state management is essential.