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Young people are looking for changes in the assignment of careers
Posted On 25 Oct 2016
It is the first time that Juanita Lopez, 18, will exercise her right to vote in a presidential election, and has high expectations not only about who will govern the country in the next four years, but also of the changes that young people like her, who are starting college, await to materialize in higher education.
The issue has been addressed by some of the candidates, who have criticized the fact that young people have to undergo evaluations and get certain grades to enter the career of their choice. Some make it, some do not.
And among them is Antony del Valle, 19. He will start the first year of Archival Science, but this is not what he longed to study. “I wanted to study Computer Engineering, and I had no choice but to accept that career, I have to see if I can study another career in the future,” he said.
Cinthya Viteri and Guillermo Lasso propose reversing the method for assigning quotas for university degrees. The latter even spoke of the elimination of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (Senescyt), which is responsible for the distribution process.
Luis Garces, director of the Vote with Identity initiative, calls this proposal freedom of access to public universities. “The results of a standardized test should not define in whom I want to become,” he says and explains that his group seeks that young people take over political and debate spaces, and propose specific changes.
Garces contends that young voters between 16 and 35 years will account for 45% of the votes in the forthcoming elections.
While the National Electoral Council (CNE) reported that 5% of the electoral register (i.e., 676,401 voters) corresponds to adolescents between 16 and 18, for whom the vote next February is an option.
