Taquini Plan

[1] Revisions made to the 1884 Law 1420 of Common Education by President Pedro Aramburu's Law 6403 of 1955 further diversified higher education by allowing private (mainly parochial) colleges to issue official degrees directly rather than only through a public university, leading to the establishment of the Argentine Catholic University and other Roman Catholic-sponsored colleges.

The dictatorship installed in 1966 had been repressive of dissent from its earliest days, ordering mass detentions and dismissals of university faculty and intervention against left-wing trade unions.

These incidents bolstered Taquini's call for decentralizing the strained system, and his plan gained support from State Intelligence, whose reports confirmed that crowded campuses and the long distances from home endured by most university students were contributing to tensions.

It was further advanced by developments in France, where student upheaval in 1968 led to the University of Paris' subdivision into 13 autonomous entities in 1970.

The Taquini Plan failed to geographically diversify enrollment as quickly as it did the system itself, however, since the new universities generally remained less prestigious than the older establishments.

[6] Nor did the plan succeed in curbing high attrition rates, as Taquini believed that shorter distances from students' families might do.