ORGANIZATIONAL POLICIES AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES AT THE MEXICAN UNIVERSITY; UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA METROPOLITANA

The Mexican University; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) was created in Mexico City 38 years ago. Almost since its creation, the UAM has had about 45 000 enrolled students. The UAM has a governance system based on collegial bodies for taking decisions and personal authorities for assuring that the collegial decisions will be implemented. Those university decision taking bodies approved in the yeas of 2005 and 2009 the creation of two new campuses for which there are not yet financial resources for the creation of the necessary infrastructure to effectively increase the enrollment of students at UAM in a country in which there are more than 7.5 million young people that neither study nor work. These facts reveal that the university organization does not work quite well and that there no policies for growth implemented properly. Currently, the UAM has a total of five campuses. We have studied several organizational and policies issues which impact the performance of the university. Among the most important performance issues are that 1) in some campuses the number of entrants are very different despite that they have the same capacity for admission, 2) the number of entrants with respect to the ones who finished their careers are very different in campuses which offer similar careers. All these issues are explained and discussed with detail in our paper.