The most revealing education story today is not about learning. It is about trust. At UNAM, over 45,000 of the 58,783 invited aspirants have scheduled an in-person control exam that runs through August 19, a logistical scramble triggered by suspected fraud in the university’s first fully online admission test 1. The university is not re-teaching material; it is re-verifying identity. The cost is immense, the message unmistakable: when assessment moves online, the institution no longer believes the person at the keyboard is the person on the record.
That distrust is not an anomaly. It is the logical endpoint of an incentive system that has spent two decades prioritizing access metrics over instructional integrity. Consider the Dominican Republic, where the 2026-2027 school year begins August 24. The government reports distributing 744,489 school kits, with plans to reach over 1.8 million students 2. That is a real achievement in procurement. But in Santiago, a school in La Villa Olímpica has been under construction for 11 years, with the cafeteria, administrative areas, and classroom building still incomplete 5. Teachers at the Instituto Tecnológico de Artes y Oficios in Santo Domingo have announced they will not start the year unless stalled renovation work resumes 6. The kits arrive; the walls do not.
The pattern is structural. Administrations are rewarded for announcing programs and distributing visible goods—kits, tablets, scholarships—because those produce press releases and measurable counts. Finishing a building, or ensuring a classroom has a working roof, produces no ribbon-cutting ceremony after year three. The incentive is to start, not to finish. The same logic applies to the Mexican SEP’s announcement of the Bachillerato Nacional Margarita Maza, launching in September with an initial enrollment of 30,000 students as part of 370 actions creating 156,000 new spaces 7. Creating a space is not the same as staffing it, equipping it, or ensuring the curriculum is coherent. The metric is enrollment; the outcome is uncertain.
Conventional reform says the answer is more accountability—more exams, more audits, more oversight. But UNAM’s control exam is itself a form of accountability, and it has produced a 45,000-person verification gauntlet rather than a better admissions process 1. The reform that actually addresses the problem would change what counts as success. It would reward completion, not initiation. It would fund maintenance as generously as construction. It would treat a teacher’s refusal to start the year—as in Santo Domingo—not as obstruction but as an audit of institutional priorities 6.
There is evidence this works. The Argentine study of 521 university students, published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, found that curiosity predicts later gains in attention and autonomy 8. Curiosity is not a program; it is a disposition that emerges when students trust that their environment is stable enough to explore. You cannot distribute it in a kit. You cannot verify it in a control exam.
The tradeoff is blunt: we can keep measuring what is easy to count—enrollments, kits, exam slots—or we can invest in the slow, unglamorous work of finishing what we started. The unresolved question is whether any education ministry has the political cover to celebrate a year with no new programs, only completed ones. The reader who pays for this column should ask their own institution: what did you finish this year, and what did you merely announce?