The Autonomous University of Baja California Sur (UABCS) was created on December 31, 1975 through a bill sent to the State Congress by Lic. Ángel César Mendoza Arámburo, the entity's first Constitutional Governor. Academic activities began on March 15, 1976 with a first semester or inter-divisional common core, made up of four groups with a total of 220 students and four teachers. Six months later, the eight educational programs planned for the University were already operating: Agronomy, Zootechnics, Economics, Political Sciences, Public Administration, Marine Biology, Fisheries Engineering, and Geology.

After 43 years of existence, the University has significantly increased and diversified its educational services in the five municipalities of the entity through the La Paz Campus and four Academic Extensions: Guerrero Negro, Loreto, Ciudad Insurgentes, and Los Cabos. With this, it fulfills the four functions that constitute its corporate purpose: teaching, research, dissemination and extension, and linkage, in accordance with the provisions of the Organic Law of 2014. In this spirit, the restructuring of its educational offer and the addition of 21 new study programs in the last four years, as a contribution to greater coverage in higher education in the state.

The UABCS has established as institutional policies, among other aspects, the assurance of the quality of educational programs; the institutionalization of the external evaluation and accreditation processes; the strengthening of school indicators and academic capacity and competitiveness; and the improvement of management processes. It has also fostered links and exchanges with institutions and higher education centers in other countries; it has improved the infrastructure of academic support for teaching and research in the areas of laboratories, library, and foreign languages ​​and computer science; and it has expanded and diversified the educational offer of Higher University Technician, undergraduate, engineering and postgraduate degrees. 

Likewise, in the most recent call of the Association of Universities and Institutions of Higher Education (ANUIES) to 187 higher education institutions in the country to account for the alignment of research to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (ODS) , the UABCS was ranked 15th for the number of projects presented. This shows the dynamism and relevance of the knowledge generated in this house of studies.

On the other hand, within the framework of a voluntary culture of institutional evaluation, in October 2016 the Interinstitutional Committees for the Evaluation of Higher Education (CIEES) conferred on the University the accreditation of the functions "Administration and institutional management" and "Diffusion , linking and extension of culture ”. That same October, the University joined the Consortium of Mexican Universities (CUMex), to date made up of 31 Institutions of Higher Education (IES) of high academic competitiveness. Thus, the UABCS is the only IES in Baja California Sur that is a member of CUMex and that also has the accreditation of the two institutional functions by the CIEES.

In recent years, the UABCS has reiterated its commitment to offer relevant and quality educational services, as well as its contribution to the sustainable development of Baja California Sur and Mexico, through the adoption of the paradigm of University Social Responsibility as a transversal axis in what academic and university management.