COVID-19 will impact Latin America’s educational system for decades | Opinion

When Miami business people ask me whether Latin American economies will recover anytime soon from the COVID-19 crisis, I tell them, “You should worry less about the region’s short-term economic downturn, and more about its long-term educational decline.”

In the short run, Latin American economies are likely to start recovering soon. The region’s economies are projected to collapse by 9.4 percent this year — more than almost any other world region — but grow by 3.7 percent next year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

So for most countries in the region, this should be a shorter economic crisis than, say, the 1930’s depression, which lasted ten years. Part of Latin America’s recovery will be due to an expected strong 2021 economic rebound in China, the biggest buyer of South America’s commodities.

But while Latin America’s economy will start recovering next year, the damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to the region’s education systems may last decades.

Millions of Latin American children have lost six months of school because of the pandemic, often because they lack laptops or good internet connections to study remotely. In Bolivia, the government canceled classes for the entire 2020 school year. Educators wonder how many children will return to class once schools re-open.

This threatens to set the region’s education systems back for years to come, because educators agree that it’s very hard for children to make up for lost school time.

Studies have shown that when children take a three-month vacation, they not only fail to learn new things, but they also forget things that they had learned. If they don’t go to school for six months or for an entire year, the damage could be much greater.

Latin American universities expect significant drops in student enrollments next year, as millions of students are dropping out because of the economic crisis, an American University study shows.

A new ranking of the world’s best universities by the London-based Times Higher Education Supplement (THE) shows that Latin American universities were already lagging behind those of other regions before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The THE World University Rankings 2021 shows that there’s not a single Latin American university among the world’s top 200 higher education institutions.

The region’s highest-rated one, the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, is ranked No. 240, and most other Latin American universities rank much further below in the index. And things are likely to get worse for them after the coronavirus pandemic.

“Latin American universities haven’t been performing so well because of lack of investment in higher education, lack of international collaboration and political instability,” THE rankings editor Ellie Bothwell told me. “These challenges will be compounded by the current COVID-19 crisis.”

Asked what the region should do to prevent a major pandemic educational backlash, Bothwell told me that governments should resist the temptation of cutting back on subsidies to universities, and that colleges should take advantage of new opportunities that have arisen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This could be a great time for Latin American universities to forge partnerships with institutions in other parts of the world, pulling their resources together,” Bothwell told me. “This is a good time to seek new opportunities in terms of joint degrees, joint research programs, and virtual student exchanges.”

She cited the case of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU,) a network of 55 universities in Asia, Australia and Latin America that started organizing international classrooms and virtual student exchanges after the COVID-19 outbreak.

APRU’s virtual student exchange program, led by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, allows students from participating colleges to take academic courses and get joint degrees “without the need to leave home,” the group’s website says. It would also be a good tool to force Latin American students to study English, or another foreign language.

The bottom line is, unless Latin American countries start taking active steps to prevent the COVID-19 crisis from producing a long-term educational debacle, it will be increasingly harder for the region to compete with Asia, Eastern Europe and other parts of the emerging world in the new global knowledge-based economy.

Latin America’s economy will gradually get back on its feet. But unless the region addresses its education crisis, it will be condemned to economic stagnation for generations to come.

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