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A Survey of Higher Education September 10Th 2005 The brains business A survey of higher education September 10th 2005 Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist September 10th 2005 A survey of higher education 1 The brains business Also in this section Secrets of success America’s system of higher education is the best in the world. That is because there is no system. Page 6 Head in the clouds Europe hopes to become the world’s pre- eminent knowledge-based economy. Not likely. Page 9 A world of opportunity Developing countries see the point of universities. Page 14 Wandering scholars For students, higher education is becoming a borderless world. Page 16 Mass higher education is forcing universities to become more diverse, Higher Ed Inc more global and much more competitive, says Adrian Wooldridge Universities have become much more businesslike, but they are still doing the same OR those of a certain age and educa- The second reason is the rise of the old things. Page 19 Ftional background, it is hard to think of knowledge economy. The world is in the higher education without thinking of an- grips of a soft revolution in which cient institutions. Some universities are of knowledge is replacing physical resources The best is yet to come a venerable agethe University of Bolo- as the main driver of economic growth. A more market-oriented system of higher gna was founded in 1088, the University of The OECD calculates that between 1985 education can do much better than the state- Oxford in 1096and many of them have a and 1997 the contribution of knowledge- dominated model. Page 20 strong sense of tradition. The truly old based industries to total value added in- ones make the most of their pedigrees, and creased from 51% to 59% in Germany and those of a more recent vintage work hard from 45% to 51% in Britain. The best compa- to create an aura of antiquity. nies are now devoting at least a third of And yet these tradition-loving (or -cre- their investment to knowledge-intensive ating) institutions are currently enduring a intangibles such as R&D, licensing and thunderstorm of changes so fundamental marketing. Universities are among the that some say the very idea of the univer- most important engines of the knowledge sity is being challenged. Universities are economy. Not only do they produce the experimenting with new ways of funding brain workers who man it, they also pro- (most notably through student fees), forg- vide much of its backbone, from labora- ing partnerships with private companies tories to libraries to computer networks. and engaging in mergers and acquisitions. The third factor is globalisation. The Acknowledgments Such changes are tugging at the ivy’s roots. death of distance is transforming acade- Particular thanks are due to Philip Altbach, the director of the Centre for International Higher Education at Boston This is happening for four reasons. The mia just as radically as it is transforming College, for sharing his unrivalled knowledge of higher rst is the democratisation of higher edu- business. The number of people from education around the world. cationmassication, in the language of OECD countries studying abroad has dou- The author is also grateful to the following institutions for their help and advice: the Organisation for Economic Co- the educational profession. In the rich bled over the past 20 years, to 1.9m; univer- operation and Development; the World Bank; the Ford world, massication has been going on for sities are opening campuses all around the Foundation International Fellowship Programme; and the some time. The proportion of adults with world; and a growing number of countries Institute of International Education. higher educational qualications in the are trying to turn higher education into an OECD A list of sources can be found online countries almost doubled between export industry. 1975 and 2000, from 22% to 41%. But most The fourth is competition. Traditional www.economist.com/surveys of the rich countries are still struggling to universities are being forced to compete Past articles on higher education are at digest this huge growth in numbers. And for students and research grants, and priv- www.economist.com/highereducation now massication is spreading to the de- ate companies are trying to break into a veloping world. China doubled its student sector which they regard as the new An audio interview with the author is at population in the late 1990s, and India is health care. The World Bank calculates www.economist.com/audio trying to follow suit. that global spending on higher education1 2 A survey of higher education The Economist September 10th 2005 2 amounts to $300 billion a year, or 1% of American research university of the past potential to reach a huge market of stu- global economic output. There are more 40 years to be a failure. Fortunately, in his dents. That is nonsense. The human than 80m students worldwide, and 3.5m view, help is on the way in the form of in- touch is much more vital to higher educa- people are employed to teach them or look ternet tuition and for-prot universities. tion than is high technology. Education is after them. Cultural conservatives, on the other not just about transmitting a body of facts, hand, believe that the best way forward is which the internet does pretty well. It is Enemies of promise backward. The two ruling principles of about learning to argue and reason, which All this sounds as though a golden age for modern higher-education policydemoc- is best done in a community of scholars. universities has arrived. But inside acade- racy and utilityare degradations of the This survey will argue that the most sig- mia, particularly in Europe, it does not feel academic dogma, to borrow a phrase nicant development in higher education like it. Academics complain about the de- from the late Robert Nisbet, another sociol- is the emergence of a super-league of cline of the donnish dominion (the title of ogist. They think it is foolish to waste global universities. This is revolutionary in a book by A.H. Halsey, a sociologist), and higher education on people who would the sense that these institutions regard the administrators are locked in bad-tempered rather study Seinfeld than Socrates, and whole world as their stage, but also evolu- exchanges with the politicians who fund disingenuous to confuse the pursuit of tionary in that they are still wedded to the them. What has gone wrong? truth with the pursuit of prot. ideal of a community of scholars who The biggest problem is the role of the The conservative argument falls at the combine teaching with research. state. If more and more governments are rst hurdle: practicality. Higher education The problem for policymakers is how embracing massication, few of them are is rapidly going the way of secondary edu- to create a system of higher education that willing to draw the appropriate conclusion cation: it is becoming a universal aspira- balances the twin demands of excellence from their enthusiasm: that they should ei- tion. The techno-utopian position is super- and mass access, that makes room for ther provide the requisite funds (as the cially more attractive. The internet will global elite universities while also catering Scandinavian countries do) or allow uni- surely inuence teaching, and for-prot for large numbers of average students, that versities to charge realistic fees. Many gov- companies are bound to shake up a mori- exploits the opportunities provided by ernments have tried to square the circle bund marketplace. But there are limits. new technology while also recognising through tighter management, but manage- A few years ago a report by Coopers & that education requires a human touch. ment cannot make up for lack of resources. Lybrand crowed that online education As it happens, we already possess a So in all too much of the academic could eliminate the two biggest costs from successful model of how to organise world, the writer Kingsley Amis’s famous higher education: The rst is the need for higher education: America’s. That country dictum that more means worse is coming bricks and mortar; traditional campuses has almost a monopoly on the world’s to pass. Academic salaries are declining are not necessary. The second is full-time best universities (see table 1), but also pro- when measured against similar jobs else- faculty. [Online] learning involves only a vides access to higher education for the where, and buildings and libraries are de- small number of professors, but has the bulk of those who deserve it. The success teriorating. In mega-institutions such as of American higher education is not just a the University of Rome (180,000 stu- result of money (though that helps); it is dents), the National University of Mexico America rules 1 the result of organisation. American uni- (200,000-plus), and Turkey’s Anadolu The world’s top universities* versities are much less dependent on the University (530,000), individual attention state than are their competitors abroad. 1 Harvard University America to students is bound to take a back seat. They derive their income from a wide va- 2 Stanford University America The innate conservatism of the aca- riety of sources, from fee-paying students demic profession does not help. The mod- 3 University of Cambridge Britain to nostalgic alumni, from hard-headed ern university was born in a very dierent 4 University of California (Berkeley) America businessmen to generous philanthropists. world from the current one, a world where 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology America And they come in a wide variety of shapes only a tiny minority of the population 6 California Institute of Technology America and sizes, from Princeton and Yale to Kala- went into higher education, yet many aca- 7 Princeton University America mazoo community college.
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