1.
The boom in undergraduate study
Over the past decade, the number of
people entering higher education has
soared. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of adults worldwide who have received
tertiary education rose from 19 per cent to
29 per cent, according to the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, and all estimates suggest that this growth
will continue, albeit at a slower pace.
In the book Making a Difference: Australian International Education (2012), contributor and higher education consultant Bob
Goddard estimates that the number of
students around the globe enrolled in higher
education will reach 262 million by 2025, up
from 178 million in 2010.
The source of that growth will change the
dynamics of global higher education. According to Philip Altbach, director of the Center
for International Higher Education at Boston
College in the US, just two countries will be
responsible for much of the increase in
numbers: China and India. In both countries,
the population exceeds 1 billion, while enrolment levels in 2010 were only 26 per cent in
the former and 18 per cent in the latter,
according to Unesco. “In India and China,
the target is the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development average rate
– around 30 per cent or so,” Altbach explains.
While this target may be adjusted in future –
“the Chinese are rethinking expansion as
they’re beginning to have more unemployment
of university graduates,” he says – “it’s very
hard to turn off the tap”.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where the average
enrolment level is about 6 per cent, will also
contribute to the increase, says John Fielden,
director of the higher education consultancy
firm CHEMS Consulting and a former
consultant for the World Bank. And other
parts of the developing world may witness
dramatic rises. “In Sri Lanka alone, you could
see a five-times increase if the state sector
could get its act together,” he predicts. “I have
no doubt that the bulk of the developing
world wants to move up to gross enrolment
of 20 to 25 per cent.”
According to the OECD, the higher education boom is driven by efforts to cultivate
knowledge economies in developing and
emerging countries. And, according to the
OECD’s Education at a Glance 2012 report,
demand for a university education is likely
to hold strong, having already withstood the
global economic crisis.
However, applying his own “law of expansion”, Altbach predicts that, except in a few
small, wealthy countries, any expansion in a
country’s higher education system will result
in a lower quality of education and of graduates. This is because growth in enrolment
means that students of a wider range of ability
are being taught; it can also lead to a scarcity
of highly qualified staff while government
funding is likely to become stretched.
Another implication of mass participation
is increasing inequality within higher education systems, he adds. As the system grows,
“the difference between the top and bottom
higher education establishments of any country becomes greater,” he says. “This doesn’t
mean the Harvards and Oxfords are of lower
quality, but the difference between Oxford
and institutions at the bottom of the hierarchy
will be greater, and institutions at the bottom
will make up a larger proportion of enrolments.”
Distance education may be one way to
meet the escalating demand for higher education, although quantitative predictions about
growth are difficult in this area, says Altbach.
According to his paper “Trends in global
higher education: Tracking an academic revolution”, co-authored with Liz Reisberg and
Laura Rumbley, 24 “mega-universities” are
already providing distance education for
millions across the world.
Private institutions, such as the 308,000student University of Phoenix’s online campus,
are taking a lead in creating “hybrid” models,
which offer degree programmes through both
online platforms and traditional campuses,
while prestigious institutions such as Harvard
University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology are among those introducing massive open online courses in an effort to provide
free, quality education to the masses (although
most Moocs do not carry academic credit).
Having been involved in efforts to launch
the nationally funded – and failed – UK
­eUniversity in 2000, Fielden is sceptical about
the role of distance learning. Those working
on the project “found then, as The Open
University found, that you have to have some
face-to-face contact”. The hybrid model “has
more potential but it can be more expensive
and difficult” to implement, he cautions.
2.
The growth of private provision
One area is expanding more rapidly
than any other to meet the growing
appetite for higher education: private
provision.
Over the past 20 years, provision across
most of Latin America has flipped from being
predominantly public to mostly private, says
Altbach. This phenomenon is now being
repeated in other parts of the world, particularly in Asia.
Experts on international higher education
agree that private education will inevitably
Spending on higher education institutions as a percentage of GDP, 2009
make up much of the provision in countries
with ambitious enrolment targets because of
the speed of growth needed. The private sector
(including the likes of Pearson and Microsoft)
will also play an increasing role in developing
course content as well as in supplying backoffice services, predicts Fielden.
But ideology and hostility from existing
institutions can get in the way of private sector
expansion, he adds. “I work in several countries where the private sector has been ridiculed or ignored by the public sector, but
[many in the public sector] understand the
reality, and reluctantly some of them will even
accept there are places where the private sector
does it better.”
The typical model – certainly in rapidly
growing higher education systems such as
those in Africa – is likely to end up very
mixed, with private provision dominating in
some disciplines such as business, law and
accounting, Fielden predicts.
In some parts of the world, such as Malaysia, the private sector plays a vital role in the
country’s higher education ambitions and
there are few serious concerns about its quality, says William Lawton, director of the
Observatory on Borderless Higher Education.
Countries including India and South Korea
also have a growing number of excellent
non-profit institutions. However, growth in
private provision usually means an increase
in the number of for-profit, “demand-­
absorbing” institutions, says Altbach.
Certainly, several large US-based for-profit
companies, such as the Apollo Group, are
expanding abroad, establishing campuses,
purchasing existing foreign institutions and
marketing their distance education offerings
overseas.
Private for-profit education can cater for
non-traditional markets in a cheaper, accessible format, but thorough regulation will be
needed to ensure quality, says Joanna
Newman, director of the UK Higher Education International Unit. “The commercial
model of many of these for-profits, as I understand it, is that they need bigger volumes and
shorter courses, which risks meaning less
contact time, lower quality of provision and
bigger dropout rates,” she says.
In the US, which led the way in for-profit
expansion and where enrolment at for-profit
colleges has risen almost 10-fold since 2001,
quality has recently come under scrutiny. A
2012 report by the Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, For
Profit Education: The Failure to Safeguard the
Federal Investment and Ensure Student
Success, questioned whether, given their high
dropout rates, the 30 for-profit colleges investigated delivered reasonable value for taxpayers, who, in effect, support these institutions
because their students can access government
aid. The report suggests that the cause of such
problems may be high levels of spending on
marketing and recruitment in comparison with
outlays on teaching and student support.
Some policymakers, at least in the US, have
not given up on the alternative: a two-tiered
public education system comprising community colleges offering two-year courses and
universities running four-year courses. The
Obama administration is in favour of community colleges and hosted an event to celebrate
them at the White House in 2010; however,
completion rates and rates of transfer to fouryear institutions remain low.
A key question is how developing countries
will rapidly expand their higher education
systems while ensuring that public institutions
have sufficient funding and deliver quality
teaching. For countries such as India, given the
enormous growth needed, ensuring any kind
of quality will be “a very big challenge”, says
Altbach.
3.
Students (or their families)
having to pay their way
With rapid growth in student
numbers and, in many countries, constrained
budgets, there has been a shift towards funding higher education from private sources.
Between 2000 and 2009, the proportion
of spending on higher education that came
from private sources grew by an average of
7 percentage points across OECD countries.
Although some of this comes from increased
income from private research funding and
the sale of university services and consultancy,
in most countries, the majority has originated
from students paying for tuition.
In recent years, countries such as Finland
(in 2010) and Hungary (from 2013) have
introduced fees while others, such as the UK,
have vastly increased tuition costs. Falling
state funding in the US, which hit a 25-year
low in 2011, contributed to an increase in
fees of 42 per cent between 2000-01 and
2010-11.
Although there are countries that buck
the trend – such as Germany, where some
states are even dropping the small fees they
had introduced – this is unlikely to be sustainable, says Altbach.
He cites two reasons for the worldwide
change. One is the inability or unwillingness
of governments to fund growth in higher
education, and the second is a shift in attitudes
towards higher education, from the concept
of higher education as a public good to its
being a private good. “Partly it’s ideology
and partly it’s reality,” says Altbach. “Higher
Change in the proportion of private expenditure on higher education between 2000 and 2009
40
Private
Public
35
3.0%
30
2.5%
25
Percentage points
2.0%
1.5%
20
15
10
5
1.0%
0
0.5%
-5
0.0%
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Source: Education at a Glance 2012, OECD
36 Times Higher Education 31 January 2013
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1. Change between 2000 and 2009 is not available as the value for 2000 is missing
2. Includes varying levels of education
Source: Education at a Glance 2012, OECD
31 January 2013 Times Higher Education 37