Hi, all. Time for a quarterly recap of what’s been going on in higher education. You might think summer would be a quiet time for developments in higher education but a) “summer” is a geographically relative term and b) “back to school” is usually when things go bananas in the higher education world. This year was no exception. Let’s get to it.
Therewas drama, as there always is, with respect to funding for higher education. In Argentina, Javier Milei continues to defy the Supreme Court by not implementing the funding law passed by Congress late last year. In fact, he has just introduced a new budget in which universities will receive an increase of over 20%, but since inflation is currently nearer 30%, this is about 37% lower in real terms than what universities received four years ago, and is a full $3.5 trillion pesos below what the legislation passed by Congress law actually requires. In Pakistan, another budget kept core funding to universities even in nominal terms meaning that since COVD started, real base funding to universities is now down by half of what it as five years ago. In the UK, there are no new cuts from government, but the financial consequences of years of poor decision-making in government and institutions alike mean that layoffs are continuing through the system, most notably at Dundee, Glasgow, Exeter, Sheffield and Edinburgh.
The only place where there is much good news is South Korea, where the government continues to pump money into the system through schemes like the plan to create 10 regional super-universities (informally known as the 10 SNUs Plan). But even there, universities find reasons to complain. There is controversy over the selection process for the plan and more generally university leaders are worried that while the government is putting a lot of money into education, it’s mostly as volatile project money and not stable core funding.
With respect to tuition fees and student assistance, four countries have made headlines, each with quite different policies. The report on the Assises de financement was released in France and one of the main recommendations was that the country needed to introduce tuition fees of about €900 at its public universities (tuition is already a staple at the country’s private universities and grandes écoles which make up about 35% of all enrolment). All political parties will avoid that like the plague in the run-up to the presidential election next spring but expect it to return to the agenda about a year from now.
In South Korea, the steeply declining youth population is causing real difficulties to rural universities. The government’s solution? Make the first year of studies free at public universities in small and medium-sized cities. Early indications are that the plan is working; the question is whether this is just shifting enrolment from privates to publics and hastening the demise of the former.
In Kenya, the government has decided to bring in what it calls “fully-funded studies” starting in January. This does not mean that tuition is free: rather, it means that the government is offering loans to all students – regardless of parental income – to cover tuition, meaning the system looks a lot like the UK or Australia, only without debt collection through the tax system. If Kenya still had the exceptionally-high (for Africa) loan repayment rate that it had a decade ago, this might make sense; however, repayment rates have been dropping for many years and while this policy provides a quick-fix for families who dislike paying fees, it will almost certainly loses a tremendous amount of money in the long term while doing nothing to improve the collapsing finances of the country’s universities. And, finally, Cape Verde announced that it was eliminating tuition at its only public university effective immediately.
The enthusiasm for subsidizing tuition in Africa has one major consequence – it means there isn’t all that much left over to pay professors. In the past three months there had been labour action in Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana. And problems extended outside Africa too: non-payment of wages caused strikes at individual universities in Pakistan and Iran. In Venezuela, professors are not on strike, but their regular pay is now less than $1/month.
Governance has been a major topic in different parts of the world. The biggest news comes from Malaysia, where the government announced the abolition of the Universities and Colleges Act of 1971, which not only regulated universities, but to a large extent regulated student behaviour as well. This is seen as a major advance for personal liberties and academic freedom, but there is still the question of what exactly will replace the act. The other site of major change is Australia, where the government has seen fit set up the Australian Tertiary Education Commission alongside the existing Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA). The idea is that TEQSA is a regulator while ATEC is a “steward”, but since the latter is now in charge of enforcing mission-based compacts and the number of places each university can offer, this seems like a distinction without a difference. Add to that the government imposing new federal governance standards, TEQSA deciding in effect to call no-confidence in management at Australian National University, and you can see why Australian universities are now calling from protection from bureaucratic overreach.
In Europe, a different type of governance reform discussion has sprung up in regard to insulating the higher education system from the far right. This has been particularly urgent in Germany, where both the country’s federal system with respect to science and higher education hitherto required that states and the federal government reach unanimity for policies like student aid and research funding in order for change to occur. This presented a challenge, as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland was predicted to make big breakthroughs in September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg (which they did, though at time of writing, they have yet to actually take power in either). Under the old rules, a single far-right government might paralyze the entire national system. Under new agreements hastily agreed this summer, both the Conferences of science ministers and of education ministers agreed new sets of working rules which allows policy to be altered with the agreement of just thirteen of sixteen länder, meaning the system is safe – for now. Meanwhile in much more centralized France, people are turning their attention to how the higher education system might be able to protect itself from Trump-like attacks if the Rassemblement Nationale were to take power in May. The answer: probably not very well.
There were the usual seasonal stories. Summer usually brings stories about youth/graduate unemployment or graduate salaries and this summer was no different with stories appearing from China, Hong Kong, Kenya, Italy, Namibia, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and Tunisia. Few of these were good news but apart from Italy and South Africa few were terrible either; the most surprising story perhaps was the Swiss outcome where apparently the highest graduate unemployment rates are to be found in Economics and Business. Similarly, back-to-school always brings stories about housing shortages or spiking rental prices for students (see here for stories from the Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain and Somalia). With the exception perhaps of the story from Somalia, none of the housing were particularly out-of-the-ordinary.
Beyond all that though, the two stories in the past three months that will probably be seen as the most consequential in the long term have to do with examinations in Mexico and India. The first one was the catastrophic introduction of online entrance examinations at UNAM which resulted in widespread allegations of cheating and a torrid time for UNAM in the (see here for my interview with CINEVSTAV’s Alma Maldonado Maldonado on the subject). The second has to do with the “Cockroach Janata Party” in India (see here for an explanation of the name), a somewhat inchoate protest movement that latched on to frustrations about corruption and leaks in the medical exam system to lead a vast protest movement that succeeded in ousting the education minister and receiving promises of a reform of the exam system (jury is out on how serious that is).
Why do I single out these two stories? Well, it’s worth going back over the past couple of years and the youth movements in places like Serbia, Nepal, Morocco, Bangladesh and Iran. Almost the entire world has a problem in that social and economic mobility seems to be declining. This is a problem for higher education because the expansion of higher education was based on the premise that more higher education = more economic/social mobility. Young people are starting to think that the game is rigged; it’s been notable the extent to which youth protests have been about corruption in various forms. In most of the world, the notion that exams make access to university “fair” is the main reason why people are enthusiastic exams. That of course has always been a debatable proposition – exams can easily be seen be a way of “merit-washing” wealth and privilege – but the point is that trust in the sanctity of exams is a major piece of what undergirds faith in social mobility and trust in higher education. It’s very hard to imagine what would happen to higher education worldwide if that trust were ever to disappear.
