Abstract:

The institutional identity is the joint of socio-cultural actions shared by the university community, which defines, orientates and gives meaning to its daily practices (Arteaga, Joya and Bastidas, 2014). The term it includes a whole range of norms, values, aims, procedures and institutions’ practices that the university has, and when these actions are oriented as a response to a society demand, it is given an identity in a determined period of time (Cortés, 2011).

Even though it is composed by a diversity of elements, the interest of this work is focused on studying the university values as a fundamental part of the institutional identity that impacts in the type of person and citizen that the university is training. Due to the above mentioned characteristics, it is crucial knowing what values are promoted and frame the higher education institutions; for that reason, the present paper has following objectives: 1) identify which are the main values in the universities in México and 2) determine the similarities and differences between public and privates institutions regarding their values.
To determine the institutions that were analysed, the main Mexicans universities were considered according to the QS World University Rankings: in total 25 universities were included, of which 18 institutions are public and 7 are private.

The information regarding the values was obtained mainly from three different sources:
a) universities web pages,
b) institutional development plans or
c) universities’ ethic codes available online.

In order to analyse the information, a matrix was made in where was placed a list of values and the presence of these in each university were registered. Afterwards, the frequencies were obtained and arranged in downward order for identifying coincidences and differences.

Among the main results, it was found that the honesty and respect are the two values that are present in most public universities, while in private universities, freedom is the value considered in most institutions. In general, important differences in hierarchy and values’ choices between public or private universities were found. There are many coincidences in the values between most of the public universities, meanwhile a few similarities were found in private universities. This could be related to the mission and approach that the public universities shares, while the private universities have their own particular characteristics like the religious approach, emphasis in business, or the socioeconomic level of people who are part of the university community.

Keywords:

Institutional values, quality of education, academic identity, higher education.