Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
In the 1970s and 1980s, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation contributed
to improving the quality of university education by
providing funds and grants for developing programs as well as
for faculty study in the United States. Legislation also created
the National Council of Higher Education (Consejo Nacional
de Education Superior—Cones) in 1983 to deal with issues surrounding
accreditation, the awarding of degrees, and coordination
of programs on a national level.
The sole public institution of higher education in the
Dominican Republic is the UASD, which traces its lineage
directly to the Universitas Santi Dominici, established in 1538,
and was formerly known as the Universidad de Santo Domingo.
Although the university's administration is autonomous,
the government provides all of its funding. This enables the
UASD to offer courses free of charge to all enrolled students.
The student body grew to more than 100,000 in the late 1980s.
However, its Santo Domingo enrollments began to decline in
the early 1990s. During this period, the UASD's four regional
university centers—El Norte, El Sur, El Este, and El Oeste—and
other universities, six new ones and two older ones, the Pedro
Henriquez Ureha National University (UNPHU) and UCMM,
expanded and offered needed courses of instruction.
The leading private institutions in the Dominican Republic
are the UCMM, based on the United States model, established
in Santiago in 1962 (it had three regional centers in the 1990s)
and administered by the Roman Catholic Church, and the
UNPHU, established in Santo Domingo in 1967. Four other
private universities were established in the 1970s, eleven in the
1980s, and six in the 1990s. In the early 1980s, the UCMM had
a student body of approximately 5,000, while the UNPHU
enrolled approximately 10,000. By 1997 UCCM enrollment
had reached 9,438 as a result of many student scholarships and
its
moderate tuition, whereas UNPHU enrollment had
declined to 6,044 because of a combination of factors: high
tuition, few scholarships, and a politically conservative reputation.
Enrollment in elementary and secondary private schools
also expanded during the post-Trujillo era. Private schools,
most of them operated by the Roman Catholic Church, enjoy a
reputation for academic superiority over public schools. By the
1970s, they had become the preferred educational option for
children of the urban middle class, the alternative being study
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