El Espacio Común de Educación Superior Tecnológica es el medio por el cual los subsistemas de los Institutos Tecnológicos, las Universidades Politécnicas y las Universidades Tecnológicas, bajo la dirección de la Subsecretaria de Educación Superior de la SEP, se asocian estratégicamente para desarrollar y consolidar actividades académicas y administrativas, de cooperación y acción conjunta, en temas y experiencias de interés común, con la finalidad de crear un ambiente educativo flexible y de libre tránsito.
Objetivo
Establecer un espacio integrado por los Institutos Tecnológicos, las Universidades Tecnológicas y las Universidades Politécnicas, que permita el intercambio y la cooperación,  para elevar la calidad de la educación en beneficio de la comunidad estudiantil y académica, así como establecer una plataforma que promueva su internacionalización.
Alcances
Los procesos de colaboración entre las IES participantes permitirá desarrollar y fortalecer la calidad educativa, a través del reconocimiento mutuo de la competitividad, comparabilidad y compatibilidad de sus programas educativos de nivel licenciatura y posgrado.
Las estrategias y acciones pactadas en el seno de esta alianza, están orientadas esencialmente a elevar la competitividad económica y social de México, a través de una educación superior tecnológica basada en el desarrollo de competencias profesionales  y en el aseguramiento de la calidad y la empleabilidad de los egresados de las instituciones  participantes.
Articulación de esfuerzos en materia de docencia, investigación, vinculación y gestión social del conocimiento, que posibilitará el diálogo y la cooperación entre las instituciones de educación superior tecnológica de México y del extranjero.

Institutional Management in Higher Education, Higher Education in Regional and City Development: Antioquia, Colombia 2012.
This publication explores a range of helpful policy measures and institutional reforms to mobilise higher education for regional development. It is part of the series of the OECD reviews of Higher Education in Regional and City Development. These reviews help mobilise higher education institutions for economic, social and cultural development of cities and regions. They analyse how the higher education system impacts upon regional and local development and bring together universities, other higher education institutions and public and private agencies to identify strategic goals and to work towards them.
Antioquia is one of Colombia’s economic engines, but suffers from low skills, poverty, inequity and poor labour market outcomes. How can Antioquia create a more inclusive labour market and education system? How can it improve the quality and relevance of education? How can it turn the potential of its universities into a more active asset for economic and social development?
See Higher Education in Regional and City Development: Antioquia, Colombia 2012.

ByReuben Kyama. Private universities play a critical role in advancing the higher education goals of Africa, as the world’s least developed continent grapples with a burgeoning youth population seeking quality, globally competitive skills, a pan-African forum held in Ethiopia agreed.
Senior government officials, academics and educationists attending the forum at the African Union headquarters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa from 8-10 August emphasised that public universities alone could not meet the rising demand for higher education in Africa. Organised by the African Union Commission in conjunction with the Association of African Universities, the conference, focusing on “The Role of Private Universities in Higher Education in Africa”, also assessed the impact of private higher education on development. Other partners included the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, and Covenant University and St Mary’s University College in Ethiopia.
“While private universities around the world are commended for their achievements and excellence, Africa is lagging behind. Whether the universities are public or private, no African university features in the top 200 of world university rankings,” the delegates said in a statement issued at the close of the meeting.
According to participants, the emergence of private universities in Africa could help boost efforts aimed at bridging gaps in the provision of quality higher education. Globally, the forum statement said, there were many examples of private universities that had contributed greatly to education and development, including Harvard, Chicago and Stanford universities. “In Japan, private universities account for about 75% of all universities.”
More state support needed
Officials urged their governments to recognise the contribution of private universities by providing them with an enabling environment in order to flourish. In the Addis Ababa Declaration, obtained by University World News, participants appealed to African governments to expand opportunities for scholarships and loans, to enable students to enrol in private universities. Delegates said there was also a need for governments to provide the sector with improved public services such as efficient road networks, reliable water and electricity supplies.
Private universities, they said, would also greatly benefit from fiscal incentives such as tax relief, which would allow them to reduce fees and thus improve access to higher education. They challenged governments to establish policy and legal incentives that would encourage investment in private universities. Ethiopian Education Minister Ato Demeke Mekonnen stressed the need to involve the private sector in the development of private universities in Africa. He pointed out that nearly 30% of universities globally were private and depended on tuition fees as their main source of revenue. Meanwhile, African governments only spent around 0.8% of gross domestic product and 20% of public expenditure on education.
Speakers at the meeting emphasised the need to explore innovative resource mobilisation schemes targeting public and private sector alike.
Need for regulation and quality assurance
There was also consensus among delegates on the need to regulate private universities and introduce thorough quality assurance systems. Vera Brenda Ngosi, director of human resources, science and technology at the African Union Commission, underscored the need for universities to be appropriately registered and accredited.
“The emergence of private universities in Africa has to be subjected to regulations. There is also a need to avoid multiplication of ‘briefcase’ universities delivering degrees with no real value, though costly,” she said.
Ngosi said the continent needed a system of evaluation and monitoring of universities, both public and private, to ensure that students received quality education. Analysts have long argued that higher education is critical to economic, social and political transformation in African countries. Scholars at the forum agreed that universities should be the bedrock of sustainable progress. But sceptics have pointed out that higher education in Africa is still grappling with numerous problems such as a biting shortage of lecturers, dilapidated infrastructure, declining funding, gender inequality and obsolete curricula. However, some argue that private universities could help to revive higher education by rolling out curricula that meet the demands of a rapidly globalising world.
“Private universities should engage in problem-solving scholarship and transformation, boost job creation and become pragmatic in their intellectual pursuits,” read the final resolution.
* Naftali Mwaura contributed to the reporting.

By Daniel Levy. Several times his blog last last week (August 14), Simon Schwartzman has called readers' attention to recent higher education policies in Brazil aimed at bringing much greater racial and class equality to enrollments. Schwartzman zeroed in on new legislation that requires each faculty of each federal public university to take half its incoming class from public secondary schools (students who do their entire secondary time at public schools). To set the context, let us note that Brazil’s public secondary schools have trailed far behind private secondary schools academically, while public universities have generally led private ones. Let us note too that other countries, such as India, have also recently passed legislation with ambitious affirmative action goals.
What follows are one observer's skeptical reactions to the Brazilian legislation. First, the Brazilian legislation is truly radical, which is neither good nor bad in and of itself, but more radical than sensible. Second, we can reasonably speculate on outcomes quite at odds with radical intention.
How radical? In considering this new legislation along with its very recent counterpart legislation on racial quotas to 50%, one gropes to identify any policies in world higher education history that have mandated such a large quota in favor of any group (whereas of course public policy has sometimes completely excluded certain groups).  Or that have mandated even small official admission favoritism for graduates of one secondary school sector over another. Moreover, Brazil’s mechanism of reform is massive imposition of national government power over university autonomy. In both scope and means Brazil's policies dwarf even the more controversial U.S. Affirmative Action policies in radicalism. Currently in the USA, the Supreme Court is  considering whether the University of Texas can consider race at all in its admissions decisions; those arguing that it can, emphasize that it can be only one factor among many. Or, to take a more proximate example from a country bordering Brazil, the ambitious access reform policies of recent Colombian administrations tackle access concerns in poor regions, minority groups, and especially lower SES groups with goals and incentives rather than quotas. Despite Hugo Chavez’s reckless expansion policies creating new public universities in neighboring Venezuela, no significant admissions rules have been imposed on the extant universities. I can think of no legislative policy in Latin American history as radical as the Brazilian in regard to group-based higher education admissions policy.
And the possible ironic anti-progressive outcomes? Schwartzman notes the first two possibilities, and I think the list can be expanded.
    Increasing inequality between the advanced (and SES privileged) state universities of Sao Paulo, untouched by the legislation, and mainstream federal universities.
    Well-off families who will send their children to public schools, hoping to achieve higher education access through the new quota, may well additionally invest in costly private tutoring for their own children, again giving them the advantage.
    These new privileged public school entrants could bump aside students –from less-privileged backgrounds--who otherwise would have made the public secondary school quota for public higher education access.
    Ill-prepared quota-admitted students may well drop-out at disproportional rates, risking costs to them (economic opportunity costs and psychological costs), and raising inefficient public expenditures. Alternatively, preoccupied by the drop-out specter, public universities may lower standards, itself a lamentable consequence and one that could spur further exit of well-prepared students to the private sector.
    A shift of privileged students to the private sector could be particularly marked in competitive higher education fields—those fields which clearly have the highest SES students. They would switch to the sector where they can compete on merit. This too would have the paradoxical effect of boosting the private at the expense of the public sector in higher education.
    Benefiting private universities could consequently raise their tuition, further diminishing their accessibility by students of modest financial means.
    Further, some comparatively capable and high SES students may well give up on their preferred field, say medicine, where they can no longer gain entry, to a field in which they can gain entry. Which students would then be bumped aside in that second field? Without trying to predict all the knock-on effects in detail, one can at least worry about how healthy such shifts would be--for students and for society.
Other outcomes may not be anti-progressive, at least on the surface or immediately, but may nonetheless have perverse effects on society:
    In secondary education, after the legislation presumably leads to some progressive shift in enrollment by middle classes to the public sector, can anyone reasonably predict the ultimate impact when the academically superior secondary education sector (private) is undermined?
    Federal universities may seek ways to preserve their own standing through internal maneuvering that would undermine the intention of the legislation, as by reconfiguring the scope and shape of "facultades" through gerrymandering. Such maneuverings would hardly be driven by criteria of academic quality—and probably not by criteria of equity.
Anticipating unanticipated consequences is a tricky and risky undertaking. Probably not all those identified here will materialize; probably other unanticipated consequences will emerge. But the consequences identified here are anticipated both by logic and lessons of Latin American higher education history.

By Pablo Astudillo Besnier. In 2010, investment in research was only 0.5% of the Chilean GDP. A campaign group, made up of doctoral researchers, is putting pressure on government to change its policies
Science has been widely recognised as a path to social and economic development. Despite the universality of this assumption, the discussion around how to develop effective science policies, seems an issue mistakenly reserved only for 'big countries'.
Chile is a small country debating just how much research and development (R&D) should matter. We're in a good position in terms of scientific research, ranking 21st in the world (1st in South America) in terms of citations per article (in countries with more than 20,000 documents in the period between 1996-2010). But despite these impressive figures, In 2012, investment in R&D was only 0.5% of the GDP. And while Chile may now be a member of the OECD, we have no Ministry for Science and our research spending pales in comparison to the OECD average.
In response, the scientific community came together to protest in 2007 and 2010 and to raise awareness of the low investment in R&D, the lack of a national plan for R&D (the last one was promulgated in 1988), and the urgent need for a new governance on research.
The advocacy group, Más Ciencia para Chile (More Science for Chile), was formed at the end of 2010 and close to 20 science students, postdoctoral researchers and journalists now work on the issues outlined above, as well as the promotion of better public attitudes to science and science communication. Some of us knew each other before hand; others joined along the way.
We started with an online petition, targeting both asking citizens and scientists. To date, we've had 2,600 signatures. In August 2011, we gathered politicians, scientists, journalists, graduate students, and relevant experts in the field, in the Chilean parliament. The conference was themed "Towards a public institution for the development of science in Chile" and its main aim was to talk with the Commission on Science and Technology in the House of Deputies.
This first experience was, undoubtedly, an 'initiation ritual' and a success in its own right. Although the government has been reluctant to consider our proposals (though they have been well received by some members of the Chilean Parliament), the need for a "More Science for Chile" campaign has became clear and we continue to make our case in the media. More letters, blogs and articles debating these issues are now being published than even before. In April of this year we published a letter in the magazine Science and we continue to stimulate debate in round table discussions and seminars. The movement has strengthened.
Still, looking back at what has been achieved to date, it is fair to say we could have done better in some aspects of our campaign. We have had limited success in actively engaging local media and an significant part of the scientific community is still reluctant to participate in this debate - though this might be due in part to cultural traits.
Next year Chilean presidential campaigns begin and will be a good opportunity to evaluate the impact of our initiatives. The promotion of the scientific research has never been a theme in previous elections, but the engagement of the scientific and academic community, after our work began, can hopefully change this. But change takes time. Political will is needed but engaging politicians in debate is as difficult - in Chile as it in anywhere else in the world. Likewise, more scientists need to step up and participate.
Nonetheless, initiatives such as More Science for Chile (or indeed Science is Vital in UK) can still transform the way in which scientists and the political world interact and exchange information and ideas. And with continuous budget cuts or inadequate science policies now commonplace the world over, science policy could well be a new and fertile ground for young scientists to explore.
Pablo Astudillo Besnier is part of the More Science for Chile coordination team. He is an engineer in molecular biotechnology at the University of Chile, and a PhD student in biological sciences at the Catholic University of Chile.
Editor's note: A rebuttal letter from the president of National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) has also been published in Science.