It is a process that is identified as: academic formation around and in the face of opportunities and capacities, or demands and resources. The central elements of the crossroads of HEIs with respect to their institutional past and their mercantile future are presented, but the discussion of the ideological factors that have always accompanied the public university is left out. During their flourishing, the IES maintained a relationship of dependence with the State, to be more precise with the government elites, since the latter, in their eagerness to be included in science and technology programs, sponsored with public funds the innovations that necessarily had to be forged in the academies given the legitimacy that these programs had to have with the social spheres.