The national government had assumed a progressively more important role in financing education in Colombia since the 1960s. In addition to the Ministry of Education, the only important source of public funds for education was Sena, which spent around 10 percent of the total spent on education. Sena obtained its resources from a special tax on corporations based on their number of employees.

In Colombia public expenditures for education hovered around 3 percent of the gross national product (GNP--see Glossary) from the beginning of the 1970s through the mid-1980s. Private expenditures represented between 1.5 percent and 2 percent of GNP. These statistics indicated that public expenditures on education in Colombia fell well below the average of other similar Latin American countries, whereas private expenditures were higher than in comparable nations.

Data as of December 1988