The myth of free education in Mexican higher education: Approaches to understanding a policy change

With the educational reform of 2019, free and mandatory Mexican higher education was elevated to constitutional status and, with this, the notion of opportunity for access to higher education was transformed into the recognition of a human right. The text is made up of five sections. The first addresses the understanding of institutional change as an analytical category in public policies for higher education. The second refers to the understanding of gratuity from the political symbolic discourse. In the third section we present the quantitative methodological design to show with empirical evidence the level of free education in Mexican higher education. In the fourth section we present the results of the model used and, finally, we conclude that free of charge constitutes a rationalized myth and, therefore, a policy aspiration.