In an essay for Medium in November following Hurricane Maria, I asked, “How will we support higher education in Puerto Rico?” Two months after this natural disaster, the conditions in Puerto Rico were grim, with U.S. relief efforts seeming haphazard as the island struggled to get power restored.
Before the hurricane caused havoc on the island, Puerto Rico’s main public university system, the University of Puerto Rico, was already in a precarious situation. Due to the massive debt the island had accrued, and poor legislation and fiscal control, students at UPR had been striking periodically to protest the proposed $450-million budget cut the university system faced.
Students organized demonstrations and strikes to urge the government to reconsider the budget cuts, and to go through an audit of the nearly $70-billion debt owed to foreign investors. The students submitted a plan that could raise $500 million by taxing property that is idle or worth more than $1 million, considering that many of these properties are not owned by Puerto Ricans, especially those on the island.
Protests and strikes at the university are nothing new. Not long after it was founded in 1903, students began protesting the colonial relationship the island had with the U.S. and the increased military presence on campus, especially after the Jones Act granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, which came with the obligation to serve in the military if a draft were to occur. As ROTC programs were developed on the island, students grew more critical of the university and the island’s governance and how much control the U.S. had.
Over the last decade, student activism at UPR has focused primarily on resisting the privatization of the university and austerity measures taken by the government to recover from the island’s economic crisis that would lead to tuition hikes.
Encompassing 11 campuses and educating approximately 60,000 students, the UPR system is an affordable option for citizens of the island. More than 60 percent of the island’s residents live near the poverty line and another 30 percent living well below that line. How can the public flagship university of the island become inaccessible to the most vulnerable on the island?
The students and their families cannot afford tuition hikes. On average, as recently reported in Diverse, UPR’s main campus at Río Piedras costs approximately $2,300 annually, while the other most popular option for post-secondary education in Puerto Rico, the private Inter American University of Puerto Rico, costs nearly $7,600 a year.
