There are no ivy-covered walls at Alfredo Pérez Guerrero University. No quad. No soccer fields. The entire campus fits in four small, rented buildings on the fringes of a modest residential neighborhood. Its main entrance is on a busy street, between a furniture shop and a store that sells remote-controlled toy cars and airplanes, the New York Times reports. But on a recent evening, students lounged out front and debated the question that thousands of their peers are asking about what President Rafael Correa has called Ecuador’s “garage universities”: what do we do if the government shuts our school down?
“There is a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty,” said Carlos Ortega, 27, who is in his fourth year of a five-year law degree course at Alfredo Pérez. The school is one of 24 privately owned universities that have received a failing grade from the Ecuadorean government, meaning that if they do not make major improvements they will be closed. Two government-run schools also received failing grades and may be shut down…