Higher Education Policy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Higher education (HE) policy varies enormously among countries, reflecting a broad spectrum of provision and politico-economic disparity. In some countries, policy is driven solely by economic imperatives; in others, by tradition and culture. In Europe, systemic diversity is decreasing as social and political interdependence grow. In other areas, such as the developing markets of Asia, diversity of provision is increasing in line with economic growth. Everywhere, HE has become so important to the development of knowledge economies that it has become more directive, more encouraging of the practical and commercial exploitation of research, and more accountable.

European Union

Policy in the European Union and in countries allied to the European Cultural Convention is driven by the Bologna Declaration, a voluntary agreement aimed at harmonizing HE architecture across Europe. Further intergovernmental meetings—in Prague (2001), Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005), London (2007), and Louvain (2009)—have reaffirmed the Bologna process, which currently has forty-six signatories. The basic three-tier framework aligns mainland European and American HE—although in many ways it represents a subordination of the former—and is closely allied to the World Trade Organization General Agreement on Trade in Services—too closely, in the minds of critics. The process has been implemented concurrently with other reforms, including the introduction of tuition fees in the United Kingdom and the internal reorganization of universities in France under the Universities’ Freedoms and Responsibilities law. This has encouraged opposition, but central government control is still dominant across the sector.

United States

In contrast, HE in the United States is not regulated directly by central government. There are a wide variety of institutions; some are among the most prestigious in the world, and others are little more than degree mills. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United States has the second largest number of HE institutions after India, and 82 percent of the population of tertiary age are HE students (compared with 59 percent in the United Kingdom, 22 percent in China, and 75 percent in Australia). Universities are large by European standards, and those that are not private are operated by individual states. Tuition is charged everywhere, although public universities have lower fees and most have considerable endowments. In policy terms, capacity remains an issue as demand increases during and immediately after recessions, and states such as California are prioritizing the development of appropriate policies in the face of likely legal challenges. An allied issue is that of undocumented students, those who are not U.S. citizens or legal residents, who receive free secondary education but face legal and financial barriers when trying to access HE.

United Kingdom

Like those in the United States, universities in the United Kingdom enjoy an international reputation, largely because of Britain’s imperial history and its leading role in the Industrial Revolution. Universities are usually established by royal charter or act of Parliament and are state financed and centrally controlled. Policy in the sector, and in education generally, is characterized by tinkering, mostly in relation to funding and inspection. In the 1980s, per capita funding dropped sharply as student numbers rose, and the system has never fully recovered. The 1997 National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, the Dearing Report, heralded the abolition of free university education, and the government introduced tuition fees to replenish university coffers. Today, except in Scotland, undergraduates pay tuition up to a certain maximum, but funding still falls short of what is required to maintain the system against international competition and meet domestic access targets. Funding-related policies remain the preoccupying issue across the sector.

China

Funding is not the major issue in China, which has more than two thousand universities and colleges and fifteen million students. The university system was developed at the end of the nineteenth century to take advantage of China’s growing engagement with Western techno-scientific advances, but the system incorporates an older Confucian philosophy. The Cultural Revolution devastated the sector as student numbers and standards plummeted, but in 1977, the HE entrance examination, the GaoKao, was reinstated alongside other reforms that brought improvement in provision, management, and investment. The government has since moved away from Stalinist-style micromanagement toward a more strategic role, and local decision making is common. The stated aim is to make elite universities, such as Peking and Tsinghua, world class, and the government has funded them accordingly with aid from UNESCO and the World Bank. Yet China is having difficulty meeting the needs of its students. While China spent 13.0 percent of government funding on education, compared with 14.8 percent in the United States, 11.9 percent in the United Kingdom, and 13.3 percent in Australia, only 1.9 percent of China’s GDP consisted of education spending, compared with the United States’s 5.7 percent, the United Kingdom’s 5.6 percent, and Australia’s 5.2 percent (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2009; China’s figures are from 1999, and the others are from 2006). Although HE continues to play a leading role in the country’s hyper development, and this is recognized in government policy, issues remain around regulation, opportunity, and the need to improve the quality of staff.

Australia

HE in Australia, China’s “Western” neighbor, also dates from the nineteenth century and is not surprisingly modeled on the British system. There are more than forty universities, all but two of which are public bodies in receipt of central funding under the Higher Education Support Act. The federal government has primary responsibility for policy, while governance is shared with individual states and the institutions themselves, which have a high degree of autonomy. During the 1970s, tuition fees were abolished, but a decade later they were reintroduced through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, which, like the current UK system introduced twenty years later, enables students to defer repayment until they gain meaningful employment. More recently, government policy has sought to encourage collaboration with industry, but inconsistent funding mechanisms and poor governance has meant that results have been mixed. Far more successful has been Australia’s role in the burgeoning Asian HE market and the huge overseas fee income thus generated, but serious structural and policy issues remain, including the lack of niche institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States), École Normale Supérieure (France), and London School of Economics (United Kingdom); a dearth of high-quality research academics; insufficient funding; and as the Bradley Review indicated, widening participation. Proposed funding innovations, such as the Melbourne model, a shift to U.S.-style generic undergraduate degrees followed by postgraduate professional degrees, seem more like circumventions than solutions. However, government policy to align with the Eurocentric Bologna process seems sensible because the attractiveness of Australian universities to overseas markets would otherwise be compromised.

Conclusion

Despite differences in HE policy around the world, some common themes emerge as a result of globalization, including the importance of quality assurance and the fair targeting of government funding (e.g., the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, the now defunct Research Quality Framework in Australia, and various U.S. bibliometric exercises), the need to benchmark excellence to internationally agreed-upon standards across disciplines (e.g., Jiao Tong, Quacquarelli-Symonds, and Cybermetrics indices), a diminishing margin of appreciation regarding the importance of HE to economic success and the funding required to maintain that influence, and the undesirable effects among academics of increased administration as managerialism supplants scholarship across the sector.

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