Another major focus of the World Conference on Higher Education was the significant increase in private higher education institutions.  Globally 30% of higher education enrollment is now private, In Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, private enrollment exceeds 70%, and in the American countries of Mexico, Brazil and Chile, it exceeds 50%.

When we in the United States think of private education, we often think of the selective and elite Ivy League institutions, but this type of private education is atypical internationally, where the private sector commonly offers access to students not qualified to attend public institutions and increasingly operates for a profit, particularly in developing countries.

Interestingly, Jill Biden, this nation’s Second Lady, attended the conference and presented a truly American alternative to such private institutions – community colleges, which typically are public, open admission and relatively cheap in the United States.  The United States has almost 1,200 community colleges, and they serve almost 12 million students.  Ms. Biden called them one of America’s best-kept secrets and proposed that they could be a model for other countries.

West Virginia’s ten community and technical colleges are particularly big secrets because most of them developed as part of and in the shadow of four-year institutions.  They enroll about 20,000 students in for-credit classes, but also provide a lot of non-credit education, particularly in support of workforce development efforts.  West Virginia also has nine non-profit private institutions, which serve about 11,000 students, and an even larger number of for-profit private institutions, whose total enrollment is unknown to me.  For-profit institutions generally spend a lot more money on marketing, and unsurprisingly cost more, than do community and technical colleges.

The Teays Valley area recently saw the most recent addition to West Virginia’s for-profit institution landscape – Strayer University.  I had an opportunity to serve on the committee that recommended approving Strayer’s request to operate in West Virginia.  Although I generally am skeptical of the quality of most for-profit education, Strayer University is better than most.

These international trends raise an intriguing question of relevance to West Virginia policymakers: Is higher education a public or private good or some combination of the two?   Why is this question important?  Your answer to that question logically determines who has access to higher education and how much it costs consumers (students).

What was the answer of conferees?  A public good that “is the responsibility of all stakeholders, especially governments.”

Last week the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) hosted a World Conference on Higher Education.  Not surprisingly, the major recommendation to come out of the conference was that governments devote more money to higher education – it always is when a group like this gets together.

More enlightening are some of the statistics on the sweeping transformation in international higher education over the last decade, particularly the rapid rise in demand around the world.  How rapid?  In 2007, there were 152.5 million students enrolled in higher education worldwide, a 53% increase from a mere seven years earlier.  Over that same period, the percentage of college-aged young people enrolled in higher education increased from 19% to 26%.  The countries that are experiencing the largest growth also are experiencing problems with overcrowded classes and poor facilities.

West Virginia’s education trends are very different from the international trends being discussed at the World Conference.  First, West Virginia has a significantly higher college-going rate (42%) than the world at large.*  Second, the number of West Virginia students attending college is not growing nearly as fast as it is growing internationally.  Indeed West Virginia will see a decline in state residents going to college unless the college-going rate for traditional and/or non-traditional students increases significantly because the number of students in West Virginia’s public schools will shrink each year over most of the next half-decade.

*Because of differences in high school graduation rates, one of the best measures of college-going rates is the percentage of 9th graders who enroll in college by age 19, which I have used.  Some groups, like the Southern Regional Education Board, report college enrollment rates of recent high school graduates, which look much more favorable, but ignore students who left the education pipeline before graduating high school.  Internationally, the standard measure is the percentage of the mid-year population in the five-year age group after the official secondary school leaving age, a standard that recognizes differences in how nations set up their education systems.