The National Autonomous University of Mexico takes as a mission to teach higher education courses to educate professionals, researchers, university professors, and technicians who will provide a useful service to society; to organize and to carry out research, primarily on the national conditions and problems, and to extend with generosity the benefits of culture to all sectors of the population.

Its substantive functions are teaching research and dissemination of culture. Its organizational structure is divided into three sub-systems to achieve its task. These are: on the one hand, education, which includes undergraduate, master, and doctoral programs; research, which is done in its schools, and in its institutes and centers of natural and exact sciences, and on the other hand, humanities and social sciences as well as cultural dissemination.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico has two high schools: The National Preparatory School with nine facilities, and the Sciences and Humanities School with five facilities. High school in Mexico corresponds to prep school, and it is studied three years after middle school and before the undergraduate degree.

Undergraduate programs are taught in 22 schools and national schools located in Mexico City and its Metropolitan Area, and in some institutes, centers, and units located in different states of Mexico. This infrastructure enables UNAM to offer 117 programs in all disciplines of human knowledge.

UNAM has five Higher Education Schools, four in the State of Mexico and one in Mexico City, which was established in the seventies within the framework of an education decentralization project in order to benefit a larger number of students, introduce educational innovations, to impel inter-discipline and multi-discipline, to link research and teaching, to integrate theory and practice and to relate to its environment.

Through the Open University and the Distance Education System, UNAM offers twenty-two undergraduate programs, one technical program, one distance high school, four doctoral and fourteen master programs, in twelve schools, two national schools, and one extension center in the University itself, as well as in the states of Chiapas, Mexico, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco, and Tlaxcala.

UNAM offers 41 postgraduate programs with 83 curricula for master and doctoral programs, with the advantage that these are jointly taught by diverse academic entities of the National University schools, institutes, and centers offering the students a major variety of expert tutors in different branches of the discipline of their choice. It also offers 30 programs in 167 specializations.

The Coordination of Humanities encourages the development of humanistic disciplines and social sciences disseminating the knowledge generated by the researchers of ten institutes. seven centers. three programs, and an academic unit outside Mexico City which constitute the UNAM Subsystem of Humanities.

Research in scientific areas is done in nineteen institutes; ten centers and five programs gathered in the Coordination of Scientific Research.

The Coordination of Culture Dissemination is the area of UNAM in charge of fostering and disseminating culture and managing the university extension activities. To achieve this, UNAM counts on the Cultural University Center, in University City, the Tlatelolco Cultural University Center, Radio UNAM, as well as thirteen museums inside and outside of University City.