Evaluating the success of educational policy in Mexican Higher Education

State support in higher education (HE) is often justified on the grounds that HE is important for the development of the country. However, little analysis is normally done in order to assess the impact of education quality initiatives. The Mexican government has been engaging in a policy of HE quality improvement that can be traced to 1989. In this paper we use data from the period 2007–2010, when the various quality programmes were in action, in order to see if, on the basis of public information, it is possible to trace their impact on Federal, State, and Private Universities in Mexico. The technical approach is based on Multivariate Statistical Analysis, particularly in Ordinal Multidimensional Scaling. It was found that, during the period studied, the performance indicators used in this study show a general quality improvement in Mexican HE, and that this improvement has extended to both the State and the Private sectors. Whether this improvement is just in the data or it is real, we cannot say using published data.