I have a book out.  Well, a volume I co-edited anyway, with my colleague Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.   It’s called International Perspectives in Higher Education: Balancing Access, Equity and Cost, and it’s available now from Harvard Education Press (if you’re interested in buying it do so direct from Harvard at the link above, because Amazon.ca says delivery takes 1-3 months).   

The book’s a slightly eclectic set of essays which touches on topics like student aid, tuition, admissions policies, and private higher education.  The theme, loosely, is “stop cherry-picking policy initiatives from other countries!” (it’s aimed at an American policy audience, but trust me, this happens in Canada all the time), and it includes three fascinating case studies from Chile, Brazil and Argentina to drive this point home.

I won’t bore you with a recounting of the book (though I will take part of next week to walk you through the interesting bits of my article on student loans), but I do want to talk a bit today about some of the things I learned while putting it together.

1)      Everybody wants a Silver Bullet.  As soon as you tell people that you specialize in education, assuming their eyes don’t glaze over, everyone asks a question which is a variation on “which country does higher education right”, or “what’s the one best policy out there to achieve X” (where X is a specific sub-policy field your interlocutor cares about)?  We mostly wrote the book to explain to people why there is no good answer to this question and people should stop looking for miracle solutions.

2)      Every policy has trade-offs.  Free tuition in Germany looks really good – until you realise the way they afford it is to pay profs a lot less and admit far fewer (and on average more affluent) students than we do.  Australia’s system of loans with generous repayment thresholds long boasted excellent repayment rates – but that was mainly because until ten years ago it was only available to students in universities; once it was opened up to students in other types of institutions whose labour market outcomes were not as good, the benefits of this policy became less obvious.  And it’s not just that policies have trade-offs: unless you really delve quite deeply into them, it’s easy to remain oblivious to how these trade-offs are embedded.

3)      Everybody has different goals.  Maybe a more important reason it’s difficult to identify “best practices” is that what differs more than practices or policies between countries are underlying value frameworks.  Not every country or policy seeks to maximise the same thing.  The answer to the question “who does it best” (where “it” is an outcome like “affordability” or “access” or “innovation”) usually does not result in a list of policies which are particularly innovative or interesting; it just gets you a list of countries that put funding or incentives on that particular outcome.  But, when they do that, they *aren’t* putting money on other things.  You get what you pay for.

4)      Nobody notices their own successes.  If you want to know what a country excels at in higher education, find out what they don’t talk about.   Sometimes when a value is held so deep and embedded so deeply in a system, you don’t even notice it’s there (kind of like fish who don’t know what water is).  Americans, for instance, hold forth vociferously on the various inadequacies of their system.  But you never hear them complaining about financial support for part-time or mature students, or about inadequate program choice, or about insufficient institutional diversification, or support for health research.  And the reason is, all that stuff is baked into the US system so deeply, compared to other countries, they don’t even realise that these are things others don’t have and aspire to.  In Canada the thing almost nobody talks about is university admissions: we have a system which is uniquely void of standardized testing and institutional prestige hierarchies.  This not only promotes greater equality overall, but it also frankly makes late adolescence a heck of a lot more enjoyable.  But we are utterly clueless as to how good we have it, because it isn’t something we consciously embraced or a policy we chose to implement; rather, it’s a value embedded in our system.

I’ll leave it there for now.  Have a great weekend; enjoy the last couple of days of Hatsu Basho, and we’ll see you Monday.