Greater Buenos Aires, universities and public policy

How to cite this work

Bentivegna, Leonel S. “Conurbano, universidades y políticas públicas: un análisis de la UPE desde su creación en 2011” [Greater Buenos Aires, universities and public policy: an analysis of the UPE since its creation in 2011], Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza, 2026. https://www.leobentivegna.com/en/articles/conurbano-universidades-politicas-publicas

Education as a territorial divide

Over the last two decades, Argentina faced a historical challenge of considerable scale: most young people in Greater Buenos Aires lacked any real opportunity to access quality higher education within their own territory. While traditional universities remained concentrated in the urban centre, entire populations across Greater Buenos Aires grew up unable to break through the geographic barriers standing in the way of their professional training. Distances, daily commutes of two or three hours, and the costs of constant travel became invisible walls excluding a growing share of a region that accounted for nearly 76% of the population of Buenos Aires province and 24% of the country’s total population. This geography of educational inequality was not a historical accident, but the result of decades of accumulated policy decisions that prioritised concentration over territorial spread.

Against this backdrop of deep inequity, the Argentine state carried out, between 2003 and 2015, one of the boldest transformations in university policy: the creation of eighteen new national universities, seven of which were established in Greater Buenos Aires. This study focuses on one of these institutions, the Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza (UPE, Ezeiza Provincial University), to examine how public policy takes concrete territorial form and generates opportunities where previously there were barely any. The interest in studying the UPE is not merely anecdotal: it is the only public university in the country offering a degree in Airport Management, making it an institution with characteristics unprecedented anywhere in Latin America.

Background: Argentine higher education before 2003

To understand the significance of the UPE’s creation, it is essential to place it within the long historical arc of Argentine higher education. At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina had only four national universities: the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (1613), a pioneer in the region; the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires (1821); the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (1906); and the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (1919). This initial layout reflected the political and economic geography of the time, concentrating institutions in cities of greater administrative importance. Seventy years later, that number had risen only to eleven universities, including institutions such as the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional and the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste.

It was only with the return of democracy in 1983 that a significant shift in education policy took place. The government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) identified, as one of its priority goals, rebuilding ties with universities and reinstating researchers who had been exiled for political reasons during the military dictatorship. In this new democratic period, university enrolment grew rapidly: while there were 416,000 university students in 1983, that figure reached almost 500,000 in 1984 and surpassed 700,000 by 1986. This growth, however, was distributed unevenly across the territory, concentrated mainly in traditional universities in well-established urban areas.

The shift in university policy: a profound change in perspective

Analía Otero, one of the researchers who has most closely studied the new universities of Greater Buenos Aires, argues precisely that the creation of these institutions was not an isolated event but the response to a broader shift in how the Argentine state conceived of higher education and its role in national society. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, universities expanded unevenly: while some regions became saturated with competing academic offerings, Greater Buenos Aires remained on the educational periphery, practically left to its own devices.

It was only with the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2003–2015) that a clear qualitative leap occurred in the state’s commitment to higher education as a strategic policy. Education stopped being seen as a necessary but burdensome budget expense and came to be explicitly conceived as a fundamental investment in the country’s medium- and long-term development. The figures make this unambiguously clear: education spending grew from 3.7% of GDP in 2003 to 5.78% in 2015, while the university budget multiplied considerably, both in absolute terms and as a share of total public spending.

At the same time, transformative laws were passed, such as the National Education Law (2006), which changed the very structure of the education system, and, at the end of that presidential period, Law 27,204 (2015), which banned tuition fees in undergraduate education and established free and unrestricted admission to public universities. However — and this is essential to understanding the real impact — budget investment alone would not have produced the structural change that was sought. What proved decisive was that this financial commitment was accompanied by a profound rethinking of the university’s social role within its territory.

New universities, new institutional cultures

Ernesto Villanueva, in his analysis of university institutional culture, observes that the new universities deliberately abandoned the elitist ideal of training only academics and researchers, focusing instead on training professionals who could move directly into public administration and the private sector. This distinction is crucial: it was not simply a matter of replicating traditional universities in new locations, but of designing institutions responsive to the specific territorial and demographic particularities of each region. The notion of “vecinalización” — roughly, “becoming a neighbour” — coined by Carlos Pérez Rasetti, precisely captures this strategy of territorial transformation. The university becomes a “neighbour” to the student, removing physical and economic barriers to access and allowing young people who would otherwise never have set foot in a place of higher learning to train professionally without leaving their home territory or undertaking commutes they could not sustain. This proximity is not a luxury but a fundamental material condition for educational inclusion.

Eighteen universities: a coordinated strategy of territorial inclusion

Between 2003 and 2015, under the Kirchner governments, the Argentine state created eighteen national universities in a coordinated and strategic manner. This number was not arbitrary: it followed a thorough diagnosis of the territorial distribution of higher education provision across the country, identifying areas with no institutional presence. Of these eighteen institutions, seven were strategically placed in Greater Buenos Aires in response to precise demographic analysis: Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche (2009), Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda (2010), Universidad Nacional de José C. Paz (2010), Universidad Nacional de Moreno (2011), Universidad Nacional del Oeste (2009), Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham (2015) and Universidad Nacional de Almirante Brown (2015).

Each responded to specific, unrepeatable territorial dynamics, but all shared a common purpose: meeting the accumulated demand for higher education among populations historically excluded from access to this level of schooling. Students from these regions, often the first in their families to attend university, experienced daily and dramatically how higher education was presented to them as a geographic luxury reserved for those who could commute to Buenos Aires or La Plata every day, or simply for families with greater purchasing power. The creation of these universities was, in that deep sense, an act of territorial democratisation: the state chose to bring quality education closer to students, rather than requiring students to permanently travel toward education.

Inclusion policies and student funding

A key element accompanying the creation of new universities was the development of student funding policies. The National University Scholarship Programme, dating back to 1996, was significantly expanded under Kirchnerism. In 2007, the ICT Scholarships were created, aimed specifically at students in information and communication technology degrees. From 2009 onward, with the Bicentennial Scholarship Programme for science and technical degrees, the number of higher education scholarships grew exponentially: while only 3,848 scholarships were awarded in 2004, that figure had risen to 48,590 by 2011, with students at national universities as the main beneficiaries.

These policies were not incidental but constitutive of the overall inclusion strategy. Without these financial support mechanisms, many students in Greater Buenos Aires simply would not have been able to access higher education even with local universities available. Scholarships allowed working-class families to sustain their children’s education financially. In this sense, scholarship policy was complementary to the policy of creating new universities: both responded to the goal of democratising higher education and transforming territorial opportunity.

The Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza: an unprecedented innovation

The UPE was established under Law 14,006, passed by the province of Buenos Aires in 2009, enacted through Decree 1022/09 in 2011 and formally inaugurated that same year, although classes effectively began in 2012. Its creation responds to a precise, specialised territorial diagnosis that no other university in the country had previously addressed systematically. Ezeiza, strategically located in the third ring of Greater Buenos Aires, concentrates a set of accelerated economic and demographic dynamics that called for specific, differentiated educational responses.

On one hand, the region has experienced significant, accelerated population growth: over the 2001–2010 period it exceeded 11.7%, well above the national average of 10.6% and even higher than that of the City of Buenos Aires (5.6%). On the other — and more significant still — the area is home to Ezeiza International Airport (Ministro Pistarini), one of the most critical nodes in Argentina’s national infrastructure and the country’s main gateway for tourism and international trade. This combination of factors — accelerated population growth, demand from a highly technical and scientific aeronautical sector, permanently expanding infrastructure, and a total absence of specialised local higher education provision — constituted the logical starting point for creating the UPE as a planned state response.

What is truly exceptional is that the UPE offers the only degree in Airport Management in public university education anywhere in Latin America. It is an innovative programme, deliberately designed not to duplicate existing offerings at other institutions, training professionals capable of managing the complex challenges of aeronautical operations, aviation regulation, operational safety and international air transport logistics. Alongside this flagship degree, the UPE also offers others that respond directly to the specific territorial dynamics of Greater Buenos Aires: International Trade, Logistics, Tourism, Health and Safety, and Software Development.

Inclusion, research and future institutional challenges

The creation of the Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza gives concrete territorial form to a public policy acting on the structure of educational opportunity. Nancy Montes, a researcher at FLACSO, cautions that although there is evidence that these new universities have opened access to students from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, this information is not always systematised or published in an accessible, public way. What can be verified is that the UPE has opened doors that were previously completely closed: for many young people in the area, this university represents the only realistic opportunity for higher professional training without facing the geographic barriers the previous generation of their own families had to contend with.

Looking ahead, the research has identified two critical, unavoidable challenges for the UPE and the new universities of Greater Buenos Aires. The first is the systematic strengthening of scientific and technological research as a substantive function. Although the Air Transport and Tourism Observatory was recently created as an interdisciplinary space dedicated to training researchers, these experiences are still incipient and require institutional consolidation. The second challenge is medium- and long-term: rigorously evaluating, with sound methodology, the real impact of these institutions on sustainable territorial development and the intergenerational social mobility of their students.

Conclusion: when public policy takes territorial shape

The story of the Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza is, at its core, the story of how public policy can transform territories when designed with a deep understanding of their local particularities. What characterised the 2003–2015 period in Greater Buenos Aires was not merely the expansion of enrolment, but the deliberate, intelligent creation of institutions designed specifically for the territories they inhabit, with degree programmes that respond to their specific economic dynamics. The UPE exemplifies this transformation: a university born because there is concrete educational demand in its region, offering degrees unique in the country, and seeking to strengthen both education and scientific research.

That said, as the data and the testimony of researchers suggest, the real scale of these impacts still needs to be verified, and the institutional conditions guaranteeing their long-term sustainability still need to be strengthened. In a context where higher education budgets have undergone significant cuts since 2016, the continuity and deepening of these policies are as important a political challenge as their original creation was. The UPE is not, then, an isolated institution, but a node within a broader network of universities that challenged the previous, exclusionary model. Understanding its trajectory, its achievements and its limitations is essential for imagining how Argentine higher education can continue to serve as an instrument of inclusion and territorial development in the years ahead, particularly in contexts of budgetary volatility and state austerity.

References

• Bentivegna, L. S. (2023). Conurbano, universidades y políticas públicas: un análisis de la UPE desde su creación en 2011. Undergraduate thesis, Universidad Provincial de Ezeiza.
• García de Fanelli, A. M. (2016). Educación superior universitaria en Argentina: dilemas sobre el acceso, la equidad y la calidad. In J. E. Gorostiaga and A. Acedo (Eds.), Pensar la educación en tiempos de cambio. FLACSO Argentina.
• Otero, A., Corica, A., and Merbilhaá, J. (2018). Las nuevas universidades del conurbano bonaerense: entre la expansión y el fortalecimiento institucional. Propuesta Educativa, 27(49), 28-39.
• Pérez Rasetti, C. (2014). Educación, universidades y ciudadanía en Argentina. In E. F. Villanueva (Ed.), La universidad y la sociedad en transformación. Aique Grupo Editor.
• Villanueva, E. F. (2014). El rol de las universidades en la nueva sociedad del conocimiento: hacia un cambio de paradigma. Revista de Educación Superior, 43(170), 45-58.
• Ley 27.204 de Implementación Efectiva de la Responsabilidad del Estado en el Nivel de Educación Superior. Official Gazette of the Argentine Republic, 2015.