El primer año de la universidad como analizador institucional

Abstract

The latest research indicates that in the MERCOSUR countries after one year, 30% of the students who start their university studies do not register any activity. The questioning about this problem, at least in Latin America, is recent and incipient, not so in the central countries where this issue has been investigated for several decades. For this reason, this communication aims to develop the hypothesis that the vicissitudes faced by the student in their experience in the first year at university and the institutional responses to the high rates of desertion and shelling, constitute an institutional analyzer for the Universities, it is an opportunity to think about the grammar of that institution, its micropolitics. To this end, it uses the analysis of educational statistics, the contributions of the literature on the subject and primary data generated through surveys and interviews of incoming students of the National University of Río Negro. As a result, it gives an account of the emergency conditions of ‘entering the university’ as a problem that draws attention to the political and academic field. These conditions are configured from quantitative and qualitative changes: quantitatively, the overcrowding of the Higher Education with the consequent entry of historically neglected social sectors; qualitatively, the establishment of it as a public and social good, a universal human right and a responsibility of the States. We identify as the most common meanings that operate as explanatory keys to this problem and the policies and strategies developed from them, those that focus on the student body with a deficient reading of them, the privileged strategies place the problem outside the grammar of the university itself, resulting in orthopedic solutions.