In 2009, with the competition of talking heads like Bill O’Reilly on the right and Keith Olbermann on the left, it’s hard to imagine that there was a day little less than three decades ago when the most trusted person in America was a television journalist. But that’s the way it was.
18 July 2009
Yet another topic highlighted at the World Conference on Higher Education last week was the increase in the number of women in higher education. Internationally, women now outnumber men for the first time, and that trend is expected to increase. In the United States and West Virginia, women in higher education began to outnumber men quite a few years ago. Today, for example, more than 55% of West Virginia’s public institution students are women.
Last month, Foreign Policy wrote about the results of these trends. The subtitle and first sentence say it all: “Manly men have been running the world forever. But the Great Recession is changing all that, and it will alter the course of history. The era of male dominance is coming to an end.” In addition to noting that women soon will account for 60% of higher education students in the United States, the article points out that 80% of the job losses experienced since November have been experienced by men. Foreign Policy goes on to discuss the probable consequences of this shift.
I had been bothered by the ARRA’s heavy emphasis on “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects and other activities which benefit men disproportionately. No more. Men need all the help they can get.
In the larger scheme of world history, the trend from a man’s world to a woman’s world, which was not a central focus of the World Conference on Higher Education, may be the most significant.
Yet another topic addressed by World Conference on Higher Education attendees was the trend of decreasing government contributions to higher education as a percentage of the overall cost of higher education. This trend is especially pronounced in Europe, which has a tradition of providing free public higher education. But the trend also is pronounced in West Virginia. At the beginning of the millennium, the State paid about 60% of a four-year student’s cost of education (not cost of attendance, which includes room and board, etc. and is another matter); nine years later students are being assessed almost 60% of the cost. A dramatic shift. Having said that, please realize that this analysis ignores student financial aid, which increased dramatically over that same period at the state level, so West Virginia higher education – especially baccalaureate institutions, which benefitted disproportionately from the PROMISE scholarship – is not quite as poor as some claim.
Despite what you might hear in the hallowed halls of academe, there is a reasonably good argument for having students pay for their own higher education, even if they have to take out student loans to do so. In 2006 the average male with a high school diploma earned $37,030, while the average male with a bachelor’s degree earned $60,910. A rather substantial loan payment could be made with that $23,880 in extra income. If the average college graduate is going to see that kind of benefit, why shouldn’t he or she pay for it? Furthermore, why should that high school graduate earning $23,880 less than the college graduate subsidize the college graduate’s education with his or her taxes?
There are two reasonably good responses to these points. The first relates to fairness and equity. Research tells us that students from poorer families, particularly with no history of college attendance, too often make the wrong decision from a purely economic perspective not to attend college. Do we really want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer? The second relates to the larger public benefits that accrue to an educated society – stronger economic development, greater civic engagement, etc. The rising tide of education lifts all boats.
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.”
15 July 2009
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.
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