Public Universities in Peru

Admissions and Faculty Salary

Visits to two public universities in Peru over the last two summers helped deepen my understanding of the system and explore some ideas for my own research. The first summer, I began visiting the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) to learn about historical admissions processes and search for lists of applicants and admitted students. I wanted to identify those students and follow their educational, professional and political trajectories at one of the country’s most important universities. In the summer of 2025, I once again visited UNMSM in Lima and traveled to Cusco to visit the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC). This time, I conducted interviews with professors and student representatives to learn about their experiences and perspectives on higher-education policies such as faculty salary reforms and the processes for the hiring and promotion of professors.

Together, these experiences have provided a richer perspective on how to examine the influence of the historical admissions processes in public universities and of higher-education policies on professors’ and students’ academic experiences and labor market outcomes.

Historical Admissions in Public Universities

In mid-2024, I began regularly visiting UNMSM, the oldest university in the hemisphere, often known as the “Dean of the Americas.” On my initial visits, I was struck by the campus’s enormous size. I had studied at a much smaller university. By mistake, I entered through a different gate than I intended, and so I had to walk 20 minutes to reach the Pedro Zulen Central Library on the other side of campus.

With the help of several professors, I was able to access the university’s historical archives and talk with staff to locate information on past admissions processes. I learned that admissions results used to be published in newspapers, so I searched the Central Library’s newspaper archive. I spent several days poring over newspapers from the 1970s and 1980s, when standardized entrance exams were introduced. The task was arduous, like looking for a needle in a haystack. I came across several news reports about the admissions process, including advertisements for calls for applications, and there were notes that exams had taken place without incident, but I still couldn’t find the lists of applicants or their exam results. These lists were published as supplements to newspapers, which were not always archived.

Peruvian Newspaper Archive at UNMSM

I devoted several more visits to digging through the archives of the Central Library and the Office of the General Secretary. There, I found a trove of materia,l including statistics on applicants and admitted students, lists of those who gained admission, enrollment records, and some detailed admissions data from some years, which I scanned to convert into a database.

Using these records and administrative data, I want to trace the trajectories of those applicants, both the ones who gained admission and those who did not, to see how attending a public university may have changed their lives. I hope to map their professional careers 10 or 20 years after their application. In addition, public universities are known for intense student political activism, which prompts me to explore how participation in campus politics might influence these individuals’ engagement beyond the university. Finally, I want to investigate whether studying at a public university affects their family decisions and the human capital accumulation of their children, 20 or 30 years down the line.

Faculty and Students in Public Universities

I also conducted interviews with faculty and student representatives to learn about their experiences and views on higher-education policies. I focused especially on the role of faculty, who have shown a significant impact on students’ learning, although little research exists into how to improve teaching performance in public universities or how professors’ influence carries over into students’ future earnings.

Main entrance to the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC).

One policy that drew my attention in these conversations was the salary and promotion system for university professors. After years with no raises, major unconditional salary increases were granted in 2011 and 2017, followed by gradual adjustments in 2023–2024. In 2011, salaries for full professors rose by over 80% (nearly doubling the base pay), while associate professors saw raises of around 22% and assistant professors around 12%. Additional raises came in 2017, especially for associate and assistant professors, and contract faculty were included in these pay improvements. These unconditional increases resulted from negotiations between faculty representatives and the government. At the same time, efforts began around 2017 to make some raises contingent on professors’ academic output.

These important pay raises offer a natural experiment to study how salary policy influences students’ educational and career outcomes. To understand the effect of these policies on teaching and students, I spoke with several professors and a student representative. My initial impression was that salary plays a secondary role in professors’ motivation to teach in public universities, as they perceive their salaries to be low compared to alternative jobs. Several professors mentioned that teaching was pursued more for prestige than for pay. Some of them take pride in teaching at a public university because they themselves graduated from the same institution, as did many colleagues, or to contribute to public education. Returning to teach in the very classrooms where they were once students is a way to contribute to future generations and to address needs that they had wished to meet when they were students.

Due to these salary levels, many faculty decide to take on additional jobs to supplement their income, limiting the time and energy they could devote to teaching. Sometimes this even relegated their academic duties to a secondary role. In high-opportunity-cost fields like medicine or law, professors often hold a primary job that pays far more than their university salary. In other fields, many academics supplement their income by teaching at private universities, in graduate programs, or by taking other main jobs. This work overload naturally affects their performance at the public university. A professor who teaches at two institutions must divide time and attention between twice as many students and may even miss some classes at the public university, which typically has less oversight.

In this context, what can we expect from unconditional salary increases? This is an empirical question with ambiguous results. Evidence from the school system suggests that unconditional raises don’t by themselves boost teaching performance and students’ performance, since there is no incentive to increase effort. Most interviewees likewise did not anticipate changes in teaching practice from an unconditional raise. What incentives, then, would make a salary increase translate into better teaching? From these conversations, a few hypotheses emerged: perhaps assistant and associate professors might work harder in hopes of being promoted. Full professors might reduce their outside workload after a big pay increase, like in 2011, which would increase their presence in class or the time they spend preparing course materials. Such outcomes might be possible given the intrinsic motivation many faculty members may have for teaching. These are hypotheses I hope to test with administrative data, and I look forward to reporting on the results of this reform in the future.

Looking Ahead

Exploring public universities through both archival research and interviews has been truly interesting and valuable for my work. The work in San Marcos’s archives is beginning to reveal data that may help me to understand whether attending a public university shaped students’ lives decades later. Meanwhile, conversations with faculty and students have given me a firsthand look at how policies like salary raises affect day-to-day teaching and learning. Together, these approaches can help me underscore the impact that public universities have in influencing students’ trajectories.

What effect does attending a public university have as young Peruvians move into adulthood? And is raising the quality of education at public universities as simple as paying professors more, even if you change nothing else? By looking at how these two strands of research come together, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of public universities and generate ideas about how public universities can better serve their students and society.