How Argentina's Public Universities Ended Up Fighting for Survival Under Milei

The classrooms at the Universidad de Buenos Aires's Faculty of Social Sciences on Marcelo T. de Alvear 2230 filled again this week, but the tension is different now. Heating bills unpaid for months, professors earning salaries that lost roughly 40 percent of their real value between January 2024 and May 2026, and a national government philosophically hostile to state-funded higher education have combined to produce a crisis that administrators say did not begin with Javier Milei, but has accelerated sharply under him.

Understanding how Argentine universities arrived at this point requires going back further than the current administration. Decades of chronic underfunding, political clientelism inside university governance structures, and an inflation rate that consistently outpaced budget updates had already weakened institutions before Milei took office in December 2023. What changed was the ideological framing: for the first time, the executive branch was openly questioning whether free, universal public university education was a right the state should underwrite at all.

The Budget Freeze That Changed Everything

In early 2024, the Milei government declined to update university budgets in line with inflation, holding allocations at December 2023 nominal figures while monthly inflation ran above 20 percent. By the middle of that year, the UBA, which enrolls around 350,000 students across its 13 faculties, was warning that it could not pay utility bills at campuses from Ciudad Universitaria in Núñez to the historic Pabellón I on the Palermo science complex. The Universidad Nacional de La Matanza and the Universidad Nacional de Lanús, which serve hundreds of thousands of students from the Conurbano Bonaerense, reported even more acute operating deficits because their infrastructure is newer and their energy costs proportionally higher.

Congress eventually passed a university financing law in October 2024 that would have restored some purchasing power, but Milei vetoed it. That veto, the first presidential veto of a university budget law in modern Argentine history, galvanised a coalition of students, professors and non-teaching staff that filled the Avenida de Mayo from the Casa Rosada to the Congreso in what organisers claimed was the largest education march since the return of democracy in 1983. Polling at the time showed more than 70 percent of Argentines opposed the veto, even among voters who broadly supported the government's economic shock therapy.

The peso stabilisation achieved through the IMF programme signed in early 2025, which involved a crawling peg and then a managed float, brought some relief to household budgets but did nothing to resolve the structural underfunding of public institutions. University salaries are paid in pesos; equipment, scientific reagents and journal subscriptions are priced in dollars. The gap has been brutal. CONICET, the national science council headquartered on Godoy Cruz 2290 in Palermo, lost an estimated 1,200 researchers to positions abroad between January 2024 and June 2026, according to internal union figures cited in congressional testimony this past May.

Where Students and the State Stand Now

The Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires, which represents student centres across UBA's faculties, has called for a new mobilisation on July 9, Independence Day, framing it deliberately around the idea of national sovereignty over education. The date is a provocation the government will not be able to ignore. Meanwhile, secondary schools are facing their own reckoning: the Buenos Aires City government's plan to reduce hours in the bachillerato común curriculum, quietly circulated inside the Ministerio de Educación porteño at Bartolomé Mitre 1249, has drawn protests from parents in Caballito and Villa Urquiza.

For families deciding now whether students can afford to keep studying, the practical calculus is brutal. A monthly SUBE card for commuting to Ciudad Universitaria costs around 15,000 pesos as of July 2026; a basic food basket for a student living alone in Almagro runs close to 280,000 pesos per month. Scholarships from the Programa Nacional Becas Bicentenario have not been updated since March. The question facing students, faculty and policymakers alike is not whether public education will survive this moment, it will, but what condition it will be in when the political cycle turns again.