Abstract

Universities are highly complex institutions with multiple strategic objectives, creating and disseminating new knowledge through scientific journals, academic events or through extension and teaching; these tasks require huge amounts of resources, which cannot always come from the State. The work seeks to explain the outcome of the generation policies for additional financial resources in Venezuelan public universities, as complementary academic funding options, on the premise that, constitutionally, undergraduate tuition is free in public universities. A qualitative methodology was used, with interviews and content analysis as data collection tools. It is concluded that power struggles, a lack of clarity in goals, the staunch paradigm of free-of-charge in undergraduate, and a lack of efficiency and transparency criteria, prevent the expansion of academic funding beyond the traditional State-assigned funds. The results suggest that the basic problem is in management and is focused on the governance of institutions