Commentary: How politics cripple Latin American universities

The new president of MIT talked about the problems in Latin American universities and why their students are all studying here. He knows because he was one of them.   - - Donna Poisl

by ANDRES OPPENHEIMER, The Miami Herald

The appointment of Venezuelan-born Rafael Reif as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week raises an interesting question: why are so many Latin Americans excelling in the world’s best universities, but not in Latin America?

Reif, who will be the first MIT president not to be a native English speaker, graduated as an engineer from Venezuela’s Universidad de Carabobo in 1973, and moved to the United States to get a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in California.
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