<<September 15, 2005>>
Archived distributions can be retrieved at;
<http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/Global_University/Global%20University%20System/List%20Distributions/Archives_from_041505.html>,
or
<http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q1A5226EA>
This archive includes a html version of this
list distribution and its MS/WORD version with its filename as
Òmonth-date-year.doc.Ó You can also access all of its attachments, if
any.
Professor Seth G. Neugroschl <SN23@columbia.edu>
Dr. Edward A. Friedman <FRIEDMAN@STEVENS-TECH.EDU>
Prof. Stuart A. Umpleby <umpleby@gwu.edu>
P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor <tapio.varis@uta.fi>
Dear Seth:
(1) ATTACHMENT I to VI below are a series of articles appeared in the special issue of The
Economist, September 10th, 2005.
These are appeared in <http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4339960>.
I strongly commend you to visit the web site, since I could not copy tables
— total 6 of them.
(2) You may be interested in reading them, referring to our phone conversations
of a few days ago on the project of creating a Center for Global Development at
your Columbia University — which is to be discussed during your monthly
seminar on Computer, Man and Society at the Faculty House next week — with
Ed Friedman and me.
(3) My wholehearted congratulations to your Columbia University being ranked at
the 9th among the worldÕs top universities.
On the other hand, ColumbiaÕs failed Fathom e-learning project (with 13 other
universities) was also mentioned — in ATTACHMENT VI.
The last article says that the Global University consortium is the future of
higher education (*), -- for which establishment we have been working for the
past three decades, as you know.
(*)
along with the globally collaborative research and development as my following
paper depicted;
"Global
University System with Globally Collaborative Innovation Network";
Paper to be presented at the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) in
Tunis, Tunizia, November 14-18, 200
http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/Peace%20Gaming/Paper%20for%20TOJDE,%20Vol%206,%20No.%203%20copy/GUS+GCIN_D2.htm
Or
http://makeashorterlink.com/?W155410BB
Dear Stuart:
(4) You may also be interested in reading this series of articles, since you
have also been advocating the need and advent of global university system.
Dear Tapio:
(5) Many thanks for your msg (ATTACHMENT VIII).
I took the liberty of attaching a copy of your excellent PowerPoint slides
(filename: PresentationVaris.ppt) you used during your recent speech at
UNEVOC/UNESCO center on 9/9th.
Many thanks for your mentioning our GUS project with my slide, too, which
indicated three roles, i.e., (1) to provide e-learning and
e-healthcare/telemedicine, (2) to lead local community development and (3)
gateway for globally collaborative research and development. If you have
the transcript of your speech, pls send it to me.
Keep in touch.
Best, Tak
ATTACHMENT
I
<<September 15, 2005>>
Excerpt from;
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4339960
The
brains business
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
PHOTO CAPTION: Mass higher education is forcing
universities to become more diverse, more global and much more competitive,
says Adrian Wooldridge
FOR those of a certain age and educational background, it is hard to think of
higher education without thinking of ancient institutions. Some universities
are of a venerable age—the University of Bologna was founded in 1088, the
University of Oxford in 1096—and many of them have a strong sense of
tradition. The truly old ones make the most of their pedigrees, and those of a
more recent vintage work hard to create an aura of antiquity.
And yet these tradition-loving (or -creating) institutions are currently
enduring a thunderstorm of changes so fundamental that some say the very idea
of the university is being challenged. Universities are experimenting with new
ways of funding (most notably through student fees), forging partnerships with
private companies and engaging in mergers and acquisitions. Such changes are
tugging at the ivy's roots.
This is happening for four reasons. The first is the democratisation of higher
education—ÒmassificationÓ, in the language of the educational profession.
In the rich world, massification has been going on for some time. The
proportion of adults with higher educational qualifications in the OECD
countries almost doubled between 1975 and 2000, from 22% to 41%. But most of
the rich countries are still struggling to digest this huge growth in numbers.
And now massification is spreading to the developing world. China doubled its
student population in the late 1990s, and India is trying to follow suit.
The second reason is the rise of the knowledge economy. The world is in the
grips of a Òsoft revolutionÓ in which knowledge is replacing physical resources
as the main driver of economic growth. The OECD calculates that between 1985
and 1997 the contribution of knowledge-based industries to total value added
increased from 51% to 59% in Germany and from 45% to 51% in Britain. The best
companies are now devoting at least a third of their investment to
knowledge-intensive intangibles such as R&D, licensing and marketing.
Universities are among the most important engines of the knowledge economy. Not
only do they produce the brain workers who man it, they also provide much of
its backbone, from laboratories to libraries to computer networks.
The third factor is globalisation. The death of distance is transforming
academia just as radically as it is transforming business. The number of people
from OECD countries studying abroad has doubled over the past 20 years, to
1.9m; universities are opening campuses all around the world; and a growing
number of countries are trying to turn higher education into an export
industry.
The fourth is competition. Traditional universities are being forced to compete
for students and research grants, and private companies are trying to break
into a sector which they regard as Òthe new health careÓ. The World Bank calculates
that global spending on higher education amounts to $300 billion a year, or 1%
of global economic output. There are more than 80m students worldwide, and 3.5m
people are employed to teach them or look after them.
Enemies of promise
All this sounds as though a golden age for universities has arrived. But inside
academia, particularly in Europe, it does not feel like it. Academics complain
about Òthe decline of the donnish dominionÓ (the title of a book by A.H.
Halsey, a sociologist), and administrators are locked in bad-tempered exchanges
with the politicians who fund them. What has gone wrong?
The biggest problem is the role of the state. If more and more governments are
embracing massification, few of them are willing to draw the appropriate conclusion
from their enthusiasm: that they should either provide the requisite funds (as
the Scandinavian countries do) or allow universities to charge realistic fees.
Many governments have tried to square the circle through tighter management,
but management cannot make up for lack of resources.
So in all too much of the academic world, the writer Kingsley Amis's famous
dictum that more means worse is coming to pass. Academic salaries are declining
when measured against similar jobs elsewhere, and buildings and libraries are
deteriorating. In mega-institutions such as the University of Rome (180,000
students), the National University of Mexico (200,000-plus), and Turkey's
Anadolu University (530,000), individual attention to students is bound to take
a back seat.
The innate conservatism of the academic profession does not help. The modern
university was born in a very different world from the current one, a world
where only a tiny minority of the population went into higher education, yet
many academics have been reluctant to make any allowances for massification.
Italian universities, for instance, still insist that all students undergo a
viva voce examination by a full professor, lasting an average of about five
minutes.
What, if anything, can be done? Techno-utopians believe that higher education
is ripe for revolution. The university, they say, is a hopelessly antiquated
institution, wedded to outdated practices such as tenure and lectures, and
incapable of serving a new world of mass audiences and just-in time
information. ÒThirty years from now the big university campuses will be
relics,Ó says Peter Drucker, a veteran management guru. ÒI consider the
American research university of the past 40 years to be a failure.Ó
Fortunately, in his view, help is on the way in the form of internet tuition
and for-profit universities.
Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the best way forward is
backward. The two ruling principles of modern higher-education
policy—democracy and utility—are Òdegradations of the academic
dogmaÓ, to borrow a phrase from the late Robert Nisbet, another sociologist.
They think it is foolish to waste higher education on people who would rather
study ÒSeinfeldÓ than Socrates, and disingenuous to confuse the pursuit of truth
with the pursuit of profit.
The conservative argument falls at the first hurdle: practicality. Higher
education is rapidly going the way of secondary education: it is becoming a
universal aspiration. The techno-utopian position is superficially more attractive.
The internet will surely influence teaching, and for-profit companies are bound
to shake up a moribund marketplace. But there are limits.
A few years ago a report by Coopers & Lybrand crowed that online education
could eliminate the two biggest costs from higher education: ÒThe first is the
need for bricks and mortar; traditional campuses are not necessary. The second
is full-time faculty. [Online] learning involves only a small number of
professors, but has the potential to reach a huge market of students.Ó That is
nonsense. The human touch is much more vital to higher education than is high
technology. Education is not just about transmitting a body of facts, which the
internet does pretty well. It is about learning to argue and reason, which is
best done in a community of scholars.
This survey will argue that the most significant development in higher
education is the emergence of a super-league of global universities. This is
revolutionary in the sense that these institutions regard the whole world as
their stage, but also evolutionary in that they are still wedded to the ideal
of a community of scholars who combine teaching with research.
The problem for policymakers is how to create a system of higher education that
balances the twin demands of excellence and mass access, that makes room for
global elite universities while also catering for large numbers of average
students, that exploits the opportunities provided by new technology while also
recognising that education requires a human touch.
As it happens, we already possess a successful model of how to organise higher
education: America's. That country has almost a monopoly on the world's best
universities (see table 1), but also provides access to higher education for
the bulk of those who deserve it. The success of American higher education is
not just a result of money (though that helps); it is the result of
organisation. American universities are much less dependent on the state than
are their competitors abroad. They derive their income from a wide variety of
sources, from fee-paying students to nostalgic alumni, from hard-headed
businessmen to generous philanthropists. And they come in a wide variety of
shapes and sizes, from Princeton and Yale to Kalamazoo community college.
This survey will offer two pieces of advice for countries that are trying to
create successful higher-education systems, be they newcomers such as India and
China or failed old hands such as Germany and Italy. First: diversify your
sources of income. The bargain with the state has turned out to be a pact with
the devil. Second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities,
including for-profit ones, should have to compete for customers. A
sophisticated economy needs a wide variety of universities pursuing a wide
variety of missions. These two principles reinforce each other: the more that
the state's role contracts, the more educational variety will flourish.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
II
<<September 15,
2005>>
Excerpted from;
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4339944
Secrets
of success
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
America's system of higher education is the best in the world. That is because
there is no system
PHOTO CAPTION: Larry Summers committed heresy
IT IS all too easy to mock American academia. Every week produces a mind
boggling example of intolerance or wackiness. Consider the twin stories of
Lawrence Summers, one of the world's most distinguished economists, and Ward
Churchill, an obscure professor of ethnic studies, which unfolded in parallel
earlier this year. Mr Summers was almost forced to resign as president of
Harvard University because he had dared to engage in intellectual speculation
by arguing, in an informal seminar, that discrimination might not be the only
reason why women are under-represented in the higher reaches of science and
mathematics. Mr Churchill managed to keep his job at the University of Boulder,
Colorado, despite a charge sheet including plagiarism, physical intimidation
and lying about his ethnicity.
With such colourful headlines, it is easy to lose sight of the real story: that
America has the best system of higher education in the world. The Institute of
Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University ranks the world's
universities on a series of objective criteria such as the number of Nobel
prizes and articles in prestigious journals. Seventeen of the top 20
universities in that list are American (see table in article); indeed, so are
35 of the top 50. American universities currently employ 70% of the world's
Nobel prize-winners. They produce about 30% of the world's output of articles
on science and engineering, according to a survey conducted in 2001, and 44% of
the most frequently cited articles.
At the same time, a larger proportion of the population goes on to higher
education in America than almost anywhere else, with about a third of
college-aged people getting first degrees and about a third of those continuing
to get advanced degrees. Non-traditional students also do better than in most
other countries. The majority of undergraduates are female; a third come from racial
minorities; and more than 40% are aged 25 or over. About 20% come from families
with incomes at or below the poverty line. Half attend part-time, and 80% of
students work to help support themselves.
Why is America so successful? Wealth clearly has something to do with it.
America spends more than twice as much per student as the OECD average (about
$22,000 versus $10,000 in 2001), and alumni and philanthropists routinely
shower universities with gold. History also plays a part. Americans have always
had a passion for higher education. The Puritans established Harvard College in
1636, just two decades after they first arrived in New England.
The main reason for America's success, however, lies in organisation. This is
something other countries can copy. But they will not find it
easy—particularly if they are developing countries that are bent on state
driven modernisation.
The first principle is that the federal government plays a limited part.
America does not have a central plan for its universities. It does not treat
its academics as civil servants, as do France and Germany. Instead,
universities have a wide range of patrons, from state governments to religious
bodies, from fee-paying students to generous philanthropists. The academic
landscape has been shaped by rich benefactors such as Ezra Cornell, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins and John D. Rockefeller. And the tradition of
philanthropy survives to this day: in fiscal 2004, private donors gave $24.4
billion to universities.
Limited government does not mean indifferent government. The federal government
has repeatedly stepped in to turbocharge higher education. The Morrill Land
Grant Act of 1862 created land-grant universities across the country. The
states poured money into community colleges. The GI Bill of 1946 brought
universities within the reach of everyone. The federal government continues to
pour billions of dollars into science and research.
The second principle is competition. Universities compete for everything, from
students to professors to basketball stars. Professors compete for federal
research grants. Students compete for college bursaries or research
fellowships. This means that successful institutions cannot rest on their
laurels.
The third principle is that it is all right to be useful. Bertrand Russell once
expressed astonishment at the worldly concerns he encountered at the University
of Wisconsin: ÒWhen any farmer's turnips go wrong, they send a professor to
investigate the failure scientifically.Ó America has always regarded
universities as more than ivory towers. Henry Steele Commager, a 20th-century
American historian, noted of the average 19th-century American that Òeducation
was his religionÓ—provided that it Òbe practical and pay dividendsÓ.
This emphasis on Òpaying dividendsÓ remains a prominent feature of academic
culture. America has pioneered the art of forging links between academia and
industry. American universities earn more than $1 billion a year in royalties
and licence fees. More than 170 universities have Òbusiness incubatorsÓ of some
sort, and dozens operate their own venture funds.
Nothing quite like it
There is no shortage of things to marvel at in America's higher-education
system, from its robustness in the face of external shocks to its overall
excellence. No country but America explores such a wide range of subjects
(including some dubious ones such as GBLT—gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender studies). However, what particularly stands out is the system's
flexibility and its sheer diversity.
For a demonstration of its flexibility, consider New York University. NYU used
to be a commuter school with little money and even less prestige. In the mid
1970s, it was so close to bankruptcy that it had to sell off its largest
campus, in the Bronx. But today it is flush with money from fund-raising, ÒhotÓ
with would-be undergraduates across the country, and famous for recruiting
academic superstars. The Shanghai world ranking puts it at number 32.
The academic superstars certainly helped, but two other things proved even more
useful. The first was NYU's ability to turn its location in downtown Manhattan
into an asset. Lots of universities have fine economics departments, but having
the stock exchange nearby adds something extra. The second was the university's
ability to spot market niches.
PHOTO CAPTION: New York University: from underdog to top
dog
What made all this possible was the fact that power is concentrated in the
hands of the central administration. Most universities in other countries distribute
power among the professors; American universities have established a
counterbalance to the power of the faculty in the person of a president, which
allows some of them to act more like entrepreneurial firms than lethargic
academic bodies.
The American system's diversity has allowed it to combine excellence with
access by providing a wide range of different types of institutions. Only about
100 of America's 3,200 higher-education institutions are research universities.
Many of the rest are community colleges that produce little research and offer
only two-year courses. But able students can progress from a humble two-year
college to a prestigious research university.
To be fair, one reason why America's best universities are so good is that they
have borrowed liberally from abroad—particularly from the British
residential universities that grew up in Oxford and Cambridge in the Middle
Ages, and from Wilhelm von Humboldt's German research university in the early
19th century.
Serpents in paradise
But America's academic paradise harbours plenty of serpents. The political
correctness that has plagued Mr Summers is just one example of a deeper
problem: America's growing inclination to abandon the very principles that have
made it a world leader.
Ross Douthat has recently created a stir with his exposŽ of Ivy League
education, ÒPrivilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling ClassÓ. High
school students compete furiously to get into Ivy League universities such as
Harvard, but Mr Douthat, who graduated from there only three years ago, argues
that they are seldom stretched when they arrive. A few professors try to
provide overviews of big subjects, but many stick with their pet subjects
regardless of what undergraduates need to learn. Mr Douthat wanted to pick a
comprehensive list of classes in his chosen subjects, history and literature,
but ended up with a weird mish-mash taught by Òunengaged professors and
overburdened teaching assistantsÓ. Looking back on his experience, he feels
cheated.
He is not alone. In many ways, undergraduates are the stepchildren of American
higher education. Most academics pay more attention to research than to
teaching, and most universities continue to neglect their core curriculums in
the name of academic choice.
From time to time, universities try to improve the lot of the undergraduate, as
Mr Summers is currently doing at Harvard: reforming the core curriculum, taming
grade inflation and asking professors to concentrate on teaching rather than
self-promotion. But reformers are fighting in hostile territory. The biggest
rewards in academic life are reserved for research rather than teaching, not
least because research is easier to evaluate; and most students are willing to
put up with indifferent teaching so long as they get those vital diplomas.
Complaints about the neglect of undergraduate education are as old as the
research university, but the past few years have produced a host of new
criticisms of American universities. The first is that universities are no longer
as devoted to free inquiry as they ought to be. The persecution of Mr Summers
for the sin of intellectual rumination is symptomatic of a wider problem. At a
time when America's big political parties are deeply divided over profound
questions, from the meaning of ÒlifeÓ to the ethics of pre emptive war,
university professors are overwhelmingly on the side of one political party.
Only about 10% of tenured professors say they vote Republican. The liberal
majority has repeatedly shown that it is willing to crush dissent on anything
from speech codes to the choice of subjects worth studying.
There are signs that scientists, too, are turning against free and open
inquiry, though for commercial rather than ideological reasons. Corporate
sponsors are attaching strings to their donations in order to prevent
competitors from free-riding on their research, such as forcing scientists to
delay publication or even blank out crucial passages from published papers.
When Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, agreed to invest $25m in
Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, for example, it stipulated that it
should get a first look at much of the research carried out by the plant and
microbial biology department.
The second criticism is that America's universities are pricing themselves out
of the range of ordinary Americans. Between 1971-72 and 2002-03, annual tuition
costs, in constant 2002 dollars, rose from $840 to $1,735 at public two-year
colleges and from $7,966 to $18,273 at private four-year colleges. True, the
federal government spends over $100 billion a year on student aid, and elite
universities make every effort to subsidise poorer students. One study of
admissions to selective colleges shows that, in 2001 02, students with a median
family income paid only 34% of the ÒstickerÓ price.
Still, the sheer relentlessness of academic inflation is worrisome. Elite
colleges have little incentive to compete on price; indeed, they tend to
compete by adding expensive accoutrements, such as star professors or state-of-the-art
gyms, thus pushing up the cost of education still further. And the public
universities that played such a valiant role in providing opportunities to
underprivileged students are being forced to raise their prices, thanks to the
continual squeeze on public funding. The average cost of tuition at public
universities rose by 10.5% last year, four times the rate of inflation.
The dramatic rise in the price of American higher education puts a heavy burden
on middle-class families who are too rich to qualify for special treatment. It
also sends negative signals to poorer parents who may be unaware of all the
subsidies available. Deborah Wadsworth, an opinion pollster, points out that
universities may be courting a popular backlash. Americans increasingly regard
universities as the gatekeepers to good jobs, but they also see them as
prohibitively expensive. The result is a steady erosion of public admiration
for these formerly much-esteemed institutions.
This points to a third criticism: that universities are becoming bastions of
privilege rather than instruments of social mobility. From the 1930s onwards,
America's great universities did much to realise the American creed of equality
of opportunity. James Bryant Conant, Harvard's president from 1933 to 1953,
opened up scholarships to academic merit, and the vast post-war expansion of
higher education extended Conant's meritocratic principle to millions of
students. ÒFlagshipÓ public universities such as Michigan, Texas and Berkeley,
California, provided world-class education for next to nothing.
Meritocracy in retreat
But the march of academic meritocracy has now slowed to a crawl, and, on some
fronts, has even turned into a retreat. William Bowen of Princeton University
and two colleagues, in a study of admissions to elite universities, found that
in the 11 universities for which they had the best data, students from the top
income quartile increased their share of places from 39% in 1976 to 50% in
1995. Students from the bottom income quartile also increased their share very
slightly: the squeeze came in the middle.
Mr Summers points out that Harvard now offers free tuition to students whose
families earn less than $40,000 a year, and greatly reduced fees to students
from families earning $40,000-60,000. Other elite universities have followed
suit. Yet at the same time those universities give priority to athletes, people
applying early (who often come from privileged backgrounds) and the children of
alumni (ÒlegaciesÓ). Duke University encourages the offspring of wealthy
parents to apply early and considers their applications sympathetically.
The real threat to meritocracy, however, comes not from within the universities
but from society at large. One consequence of the squeeze on funding for public
universities, created by Americans' reluctance to pay taxes, has been an
academic brain drain to the more socially exclusive private universities. In
1987, seven of the 26 top-rated universities in the US News & World Report
rankings were public institutions; by 2002, the number had fallen to just four.
The biggest risk to American higher education is the erosion of the competitive
principle. The man often cited as the architect of American academia's current
success is Vannevar Bush, who was director of the office of scientific research
and development during the second world war. After the war he insisted that
research grants be allocated to universities on the basis of open competition
and peer review. But in the 1980s universities began undermining this principle
by lobbying their local congressmen for direct appropriations. In 2003, the
amount of money from the federal research budget awarded on a non-competitive
basis topped $2 billion, up from $1 billion in 2000.
American academia's merits still outweigh its faults. Many American
undergraduates are savvy enough to get a first-class education. Many academics
resist the temptation to censor ideological minorities. The vast bulk of
research grants are allocated on the basis of merit. Yet American universities
are acquiring a growing catalogue of bad habits that could one day leave them
vulnerable to competitors from other parts of the world—though probably
not from Europe, which has overwhelming academic problems of its own.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
III
<<September 15, 2005>>
Excerpted from;
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4340031
Head
in the clouds
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Europe hopes to become the world's pre-eminent knowledge-based economy. Not
likely
THERE are few things European leaders like better than talking about their
plans for turning Europe into the world's most competitive Òknowledge-based
economyÓ by the end of this decade. The aim was first laid out at the EU's
summit in Lisbon in March 2000 and has been repeated with hypnotic fervour ever
since.
To grasp the full absurdity of this ambition, it is worth visiting the Humboldt
University in Berlin. Walk into the main foyer, stroll up the steps to the
first floor past a slogan by a former student engraved in gold on the wall
(ÒPhilosophers have simply interpreted the world; the point is to change itÓ)
and study the portraits of the Nobel prize-winners that line the walls. There
were eight in 1900-09, six in 1910-19, four in 1920-29, six in 1930-39, one in
1940-49 and four in 1950-56. The roll of honour includes luminaries such as
Theodor Mommsen, Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. But after
1956 the Nobel prizes suddenly stop.
The list of Nobel prize-winners actually understates the university's past
glories. In the 19th century, it not only nurtured such world-class intellectuals
as Hegel and Fichte, it also pioneered a new sort of educational
institution—the research university. And the drying-up of Nobel prizes in
1956 is not the only indication of the university's current plight. It occupies
95th place on the Shanghai list, next to the University of Utah. The buildings
are drab, lectures and classes are overcrowded, and some of the best professors
have left.
Apologists might retort that Humboldt is still recovering from its time on the
wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Yet Humboldt's problems are replicated across
the whole of Germany, west as well as east. The highest-placed German
university in the Shanghai rankings is the Technical University of Munich, at
45. The ratio of students to teachers at German universities is depressingly
high. For some lectures, a thousand or more students pile into the hall. The
only count on which German universities still lead the world is the age of its
students at graduation, 26 on average.
Their biggest problem is the dead hand of the state. The German
government—both regional and central—tries to micro-manage every
aspect of academic life, from whom universities employ to whom they can teach.
The state has progressively starved universities of funds, not least because it
has forbidden them from charging fees. It has also snuffed out academic
competition. Universities have little power to pick their pupils and even less
to attract star professors.
Belatedly, the Germans are beginning to recognise that their system is
dysfunctional, not least because some of the brightest German students are
voting with their feet and going abroad to study. The government is trying hard
to encourage foreign students to come to Germany, though its success may have
more to do with the fact that higher education is free to both domestic and
foreign students than with the quality of the education purveyed. The
government is also trying to make its universities more competitive by creating
a German Ivy League. Furthermore, Germany's Constitutional Court has ruled against
the federal government's ban on tuition charges, opening the way for
universities to increase their revenues (and prompting protests from tens of
thousands of students). But these reforms are only a beginning. German states
controlled by the left are likely to continue to resist fees, and even the more
conservative ones will charge only a nominal amount.
Universities are a mess across Europe. European countries spend only 1.1% of
their GDP on higher education, compared with 2.7% in the United States.
American universities have between two and five times as much to spend per
student as European universities, which translates into smaller classes, better
professors and higher-quality research. The European Commission estimates that
400,000 EU-born scientific researchers are now working in the United States.
Most have no plans to return. Europe produces only a quarter of the American
number of patents per million people. It needs to ask itself not whether it can
overtake the United States as the world's top knowledge economy by 2010, but
how it can avoid being overtaken by China and other Asian tigers.
The basic problems with the universities are the same across Europe: too much
state control and too little freedom to manage their own affairs. Governments
have forced universities to educate huge armies of students on the cheap, and
have deprived them of the two freedoms that they need to compete in the
international marketplace: to select their students and to pay their professors
the market rate for the job.
Still, the Europeans are taking a couple of practical steps to improve their
troubled universities. The Bologna Declaration, signed in 1999, is intended to
produce a single European higher educational ÒspaceÓ by introducing a
combination of comparable qualifications and transferable credits. Various EU
initiatives are also encouraging young people to study in other European
countries: the Erasmus programme, for example, has already benefited more than
one million students. This combination of increased transparency and enhanced
mobility is bound to promote competition among universities.
But this is all too little, too late. There has been little or no progress on
introducing realistic fees, freeing universities from government control or
concentrating research in elite universities. To understand how far most
European countries still have to go—and how difficult it will be to get
there—Britain offers some useful pointers.
Britain is a marked exception to the European pattern of complacency and decline.
It has two universities in the top ten of the Shanghai rankings, Cambridge at
number three and Oxford at number eight, and four in the top 30, a far better
showing than any other European country. It also has one of the highest
graduation rates in the OECD, with more than 30% of the relevant age group
completing university or college, up from only 14% in the mid-1980s.
Half right
Britain's academics were aghast when Margaret Thatcher set about shaking up the
universities in the early 1980s. Oxford even denied an honorary degree to the
country's first female prime minister, an old alumnus. But the long-term effect
of her policies, which have been continued and in some ways intensified under
Labour since 1997, has been to leave British universities in a much better
state than their continental rivals.
PHOTO CAPTION: Have the Germans lost the knack?
British universities have won a measure of freedom to charge tuition fees: the
amount they can charge is set to triple to £3,000 next year. They are also learning
how to raise money from both private business and alumni. If the most
conspicuous figure on British campuses in the 1960s was the radical
sociologist, the most conspicuous figure today is the academic entrepreneur.
But Britain's universities still suffer from two vexatious problems.
The first is government meddling. The government's determination to improve
academic productivity is creating a Stalinist bureaucracy of Òacademic
auditorsÓ who cannot distinguish between make-work articles and genuine research,
and its desire to open up access to higher education is creating a second
Stalinist bureaucracy in the Office for Fair Access.
The second problem is a relentless financial squeeze. Successive governments
have trumpeted improvements in productivity, which is supposedly rising by 1% a
year. But too often this is just a synonym for the erosion of quality. In the
1990s, spending per student fell by more than a third, and the student-teacher
ratio doubled from 9:1 to 18:1. Academic salaries have been falling by about 2%
a year in real terms for two decades, and the army of part-time lecturers has
grown ever bigger. Half the universities are running deficits.
This is undermining the country's ability to support world-class universities.
Some of the finest scholars have been lost to foreign competitors. Just as
damaging, the universities are being forced to eat into their capital. Oxford
is currently running an operating deficit of £20m a year and an accumulated
deficit on teaching and research of £95m. This is because the Treasury pays
only about half of the estimated average of £18,600 a year it costs to teach an
Oxford undergraduate, so the university and its colleges have to make up the
difference from their own resources. The new top-up fees will help, but not
enough to solve the university's problems.
The British government has led continental Europe in reforming its
universities. It has established a system of student loans, and has crossed an
important threshold in conceding the principle of Òvariable feesÓ. But the sort
of managed market it has created, in which the government regulates what
universities can sell and how much they can charge for it, is an unsatisfactory
half-way house. It should now set the universities free.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
IV
<<September 15,
2005>>
Excerpted from;
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4340005
A
world of opportunity
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Developing countries see the point of higher education
PHOTO CAPTION: Peking pulls them in
ACROSS the developing world, higher education is coming in from the cold. Gone
are the days when it was purely a luxury for the elite. Governments are rapidly
expanding their higher-education systems, with China probably witnessing the
biggest expansion of student numbers in history. They are trying to create
centres of excellence and throwing open the sector to private entrepreneurs.
The main reason for this flurry of activity is the dramatic growth in the
supply of potential students. Secondary school enrolment rates have grown
rapidly across the developing world. But there has also been a revolution in
economic thinking. Not so long ago the World Bank pooh-poohed spending on
higher education as both economically inefficient and socially regressive. Now
many development economists are warming to higher education, pointing to the demand
for graduates—as demonstrated by their wage premium—and to the
positive effect of university-based research on the economy.
Nobody doubts the difficulty of building decent universities in the developing
world. In most countries the legacy of colonialism has been compounded by the
legacy of anti-colonialism. Colonialism meant that universities concentrated on
producing a tiny group of elite administrators, and anti colonialism tightened
their bonds with government.
Public spending on universities in developing countries is highly regressive.
In Latin America the professional classes, who account for 15% of the
population, take up nearly half of all university places. In Rwanda, 15% of the
total education budget is spent on the 0.2% of students who attend
universities. Most universities in the developing world are also hopelessly
badly managed.
But there are a few bright spots on the horizon. Some universities in poorer
countries have been doing world-class research. The botany department of the
University of Sao Paulo, for example, was first to crack the genetic code of a
bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa, which has been laying waste to vineyards
in southern California. This work attracted global funding as well as attention
from, among others, America's Department of Agriculture and the American
Vineyard Foundation.
A second bright spot is that good management can produce striking improvements.
Uganda's Makerere University, which in the late 1980s was on the verge of
bankruptcy, has increased its student numbers fivefold and is investing in its
infrastructure. It has introduced fees for 80% of its students, and now
generates a third of its revenue from a variety of commercial ventures such as
a bakery and an in-house consultancy.
A third cause for cheer is the proliferation of different kinds of
universities. A few years ago most universities in the developing world were
much the same: designed for the elite and dominated by the state. Now there is
more variety. The biggest change is the emergence of a for-profit sector that
concentrates on subjects such as accounting and computer skills, and often
pioneers educational innovation.
What are the prospects that the good news will outweigh the bad? To answer this
question, it is worth looking more closely at the two countries that are
currently conducting the world's biggest experiments in the ÒmassificationÓ of
higher education: India and China.
India's higher-education system has plenty of inherited handicaps. Some of them
are left over from colonialism and some from anti-colonialism; some arise from
poor management and political confusion. B.S. Baswan, the country's secretary
for secondary and higher education, notes that his sector lacks a clear
political constituency. Yet the problem is deeper than that: the government
does not have the resources to fund the expansion it wants, but cannot summon
up the political courage to start charging students realistic fees. The result
is that India often seems to take one step back for every two steps forward.
Undoubtedly, though, it is making advances. The number of people attending
universities almost doubled in the 1990s, from 4.9m to 9.4m. The price of this
has been a decline in overall quality. That said, India has two valuable things
going for it. One is its collection of elite institutions. For decades, India
has been pouring resources into the All India Institute of Medical Sciences,
the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and, above all, the Indian
Institutes of Technology. These institutions take their pick from an army of
candidates every year, with 180,000 hopefuls taking the screening test for
around 3,500 places in the seven IITs. They provide a highly intensive
education, with all students and often professors too living on campus. And
they produce a stream of highly educated people who help to set professional
standards. ÒThey are a class apart, like Oxford and Cambridge,Ó says P.V.
Indiresan, an expert on universities.
These elite institutions help to keep India plugged into the global knowledge
economy. R.S. Sirohi, the former director of IIT Delhi, explains that he used
to give his staff long sabbaticals in western universities, and that about a
third of them spend time in America every summer. His institute receives
sponsorship for research from multinationals such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco,
Volvo and Ford. Granted, the elite institutions produce many people who get
brain-drained away, but they also keep many bright people from emigrating, and
may even attract ŽmigrŽs back if India's economy keeps booming. It is accepted
wisdom in India that the brightest students go to the IITs and the second-best
to American universities.
India's other big advantage is a more recent development: a booming private
sector. This being India, the sector is plagued by scandal. In February,
India's Supreme Court ordered the closure of nearly 100 private universities
because of quality concerns. Still, the best private colleges are doing
admirable work, responding to unmet demand for technical and managerial education,
often in highly creative ways, correcting India's bias towards theoretical
education, and encouraging entrepreneurs to pour millions into a sector that
has traditionally been starved of funds.
Vinay Rai, a telecoms and steel magnate, is just such an entrepreneur. Rai
University bills itself as ÒIndia's best private universityÓ, with 16 campuses
across the country. Mr Rai wants the university to fill a gap in the market,
and sees huge demand for education in practical subjects such as management,
media, accounting and tourism. But he is interested in more than just tapping a
booming market, pointing out that half his students are on scholarships. He
wants to shift from training obedient clerks towards training self-starting
entrepreneurs. He waxes lyrical about the Òbeautiful modelÓ of higher education
he encountered in America at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The contrast between Rai University's main campus in Delhi and that of
Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India's most distinguished public
universities, is striking. Rai University is spick and span whereas JNU is
sprawling and untidy. Rai is full of computers, whereas JNU is resolutely low
tech. Rai's students are determined to take part in the global economy, whereas
JNU is plastered with signs protesting against the evils of capitalism.
A growing band of successful private companies are pioneering the
democratisation of technical education. NIIT, a computer-training company, has
40 wholly owned centres and more than 1,000 franchised operations, and is
expanding to America and Britain. It has also established a research
and-development department to discover the most effective teaching methods. One
of its cleverest ideas was to give illiterate children free access to computers
in order to see how easily they could master them. It has also established
links with Citibank to enable students to take out loans to pay fees. The
company has become such a brand name that some advertisements in the
matrimonial pages of the Times of India specify graduates of NIIT.
China enrols the market
In higher education, as in so much else, China is visibly pulling ahead of
India. The Chinese are engaged in the biggest university expansion in history.
In the 1980s, only 2-3% of school-leavers went to university. In 2003, the
figure was 17%. The watershed year was 1999, when the number of students
enrolled jumped by almost half. The expansion at the doctoral level is even
faster than for undergraduates: in 1999-2003, nearly 12 times as many doctorates
were awarded as in 1982-89 (see chart 4). And there is more to come: the number
of new doctoral students jumped from 14,500 in 1998 to 48,700 in 2003.
The Chinese are determined to create a super-league of universities to rival
the best in the world. The central government is investing heavily in chosen
universities, such as Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan, offering higher salaries and
more research funding. The state governments are doing likewise. It is no
accident that the most widely used annual ranking of the world's research
universities, the Shanghai index, is produced by a Chinese university.
What lies behind all this is a gigantic exercise in technology transfer. The
Chinese are trying to recreate the best western universities at home in order to
compete in more sophisticated industries. They have stocked up with foreign
PhDs: in some departments of the University of Peking, a third of the faculty
members have American doctorates. They are using joint ventures with foreign
universities in much the same way as Chinese companies use joint ventures with
foreign companies.
The Chinese have no qualms about using market mechanisms to achieve this
technology transfer. Tuition charges now make up 26% of the earnings of public
universities, nearly twice the level in 1998; many professors are paid
according to the number of students they attract; and China is creating a
parallel system of private universities alongside the public ones. For example,
the University of Peking has more applicants than places, so it has created a
parallel university that charges higher fees and accepts slightly less able
students. Links between universities and industry are commonplace. The majority
of doctorates earned in China between 1992 and 2003 were in practical subjects,
which attract the brightest students: engineering (38% of the total), natural
sciences (22%) and medicine (15%).
But will China achieve its academic ambitions? The trouble is that investment
will not do the trick without broader cultural changes. Rui Yang, a professor
at Australia's Monash University, points out that academic corruption is rife.
The powerful academies that distribute much of the research funding are prey to
both political favouritism and lobbying. Plagiarism is commonplace. Many
academics use a good part of their research funding for personal rather than
academic ends.
The country's authoritarianism will also prove a limiting factor, affecting not
only the humanities but the sciences as well. For example, Chinese scientists
suppressed information on SARS because it contradicted the official line. A
world-class university without freedom of thought is still a contradiction in
terms.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
V
<<September 15,
2005>>
Exceerpted from
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Wandering
scholars
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
For students, higher education is becoming a borderless world
PHOTO CAPTION: Thoroughly international Berkeley
BILL CLINTON tells a nice story about the first time he set eyes on Oxford
University. He was dropped off at his college at 11pm on a rainy October night,
together with three other Rhodes scholars. One of them was Robert Reich, his
future labour secretary, who is exceedingly short. The four Americans walked
into the college's main quadrangle, a splendid 17th-century edifice, and
marvelled about the wealth of history facing them. But they were immediately
brought down to earth by the head porter, Douglas Millin, who complained that
he had been promised four Yanks, but had been sent only three and a half.
In Mr Clinton's student days, international education was still the preserve of
a small elite of potential superstars. Today it is undergoing the same process
of ÒmassificationÓ that has reshaped domestic higher-education policy. The
number of foreign students in the OECD (see chart 5) has doubled over the past
20 years, to 1.5m.
What is driving this solid growth? The two most obvious things are the magnetic
power of the world's top universities and the under-supply of university places
in the developing world. The world's brightest students—and particularly
its brightest graduate students—want to study at the world's best
universities. Half the world's students live in developing countries where the
supply of university places cannot keep up with the demand. Two of the biggest
exporters of students in absolute numbers are China (with 10% of all those
studying abroad) and India (with 4%).
In recent years several other things have speeded this growth even further. One
is competition for talent. A growing number of rich countries are rejigging
both their education and their immigration policies in order to attract highly
qualified workers. A second is competition for the tuition fees that foreign
students have to pay, which is particularly fierce from countries that will not
allow their universities to charge realistic fees to home-grown students.
Oxford has recently doubled the proportion of its overseas students, to 15%; at
the London School of Economics, 75% of graduate students are from abroad. A
third factor is the EU's policy of sponsoring student mobility within the Union
so as to create a European identity among the young.
Several countries—most notably Australia and New Zealand—are trying
to turn education into an export industry. Foreign students are triply
valuable. They pay fees to universities, spend money on things like food and
lodging, and may even end up staying on permanently. What better way to shift
your economy from its traditional reliance on primary production?
For the past 50 years America has effortlessly dominated the market for international
students, who have brought both direct and indirect benefits. Not only are they
contributing some $13 billion a year to America's GDP, they are also supplying
brainpower for its research machine and energy for its entrepreneurial economy.
But now America's leadership is under challenge. The Institute of International
Education reports that the number of foreign students on American campuses
declined by 2.4% in 2003-04, the first time the number has gone down in 30
years. Foreign applications to American graduate schools fell by 28% last year,
and actual enrolment dropped by 6%.
Coming after decades of steady growth, these figures sent shock waves through
the academic system. Many American universities initially blamed the tightening
of visa rules after September 11th 2001 and lobbied furiously for reform. Visa
policy clearly played a part, but in fact America has been losing market share
among international students since 1997. The biggest reason for that is foreign
competition. In 2002-04 the number of foreign students increased by 21% in
Britain, 23% in Germany and 28% in France. A growing number of European
countries are offering American-style degree programmes taught in English.
Germany has the added attraction of dispensing university education free to
foreigners as well as to domestic students. Universities in the developing
world, too, are expanding rapidly, and often a booming domestic job market
stands ready to absorb the resulting graduates.
Yet it would be a mistake to equate America's loss of its quasi-monopoly in the
supply of higher education to foreigners with long-term decline. For one thing,
the market is likely to continue to grow rapidly as Asia produces its own mass
middle class. For another, American universities are well placed to operate in
the global market for student talent. In the past, American universities have
been at their best when competing for faculty or domestic students. Why should
foreign students be any different?
Brain circulation
The spectacle of so many bright people from poor countries upping sticks for
the rich world raises questions of social justice, in part because they
contribute both money and brainpower to their host country while they are
studying and in part because so many of them end up staying permanently. Some
people see the development as a kind of neo-colonialism of the mind. But there
is no guarantee that all these bright people would have prospered if they had
stayed at home. The combined net worth of Indian IIT graduates in America is reportedly
$30 billion. But would all those brilliant Indians have become so rich if they
had stayed in India? ÒBetter brain drain than brain in the drain,Ó was the
much-quoted verdict of the late Rajiv Gandhi, an Indian prime minister.
Perhaps what is going on is not so much a Òbrain drainÓ as Òbrain circulationÓ.
The governments of many developing countries encourage bright students to go
abroad, often using scholarships as inducements, as part of a general policy of
Òcapacity-buildingÓ so they can plug themselves into the latest thinking in the
West.
Few highly skilled migrants cut their links with their home countries
completely. Most keep in touch, sending remittances (and, if they are
successful, venture capital), circulating ideas and connections, and even
returning home as successful entrepreneurs. A growing number of Indian and
Chinese students go home after a spell abroad to take advantage of the hot
labour markets in Shanghai or Mumbai. And a growing number of expatriate
businessmen invest back home.
Increasingly, developing countries encourage foreign universities to come to
them, rather than sending their students abroad. Singapore has established
close relations with 15 partners, including such elite institutions as
Stanford, Cornell and Duke Medical School. Dubai has established a Òknowledge
villageÓ with 13 foreign universities, and Qatar an Òeducational cityÓ with
four, largely for the benefit of Middle Easterners who want a western education
but think they may no longer be welcome in America.
Some developing countries are even establishing themselves as educational
middlemen: importers as well as exporters of talent. China not only sends the
most students abroad but is also one of the leading hosts in the Asian region.
Between 1998 and 2002 the number of international students in the country
doubled, from 43,000 to 86,000. Malaysia sends lots of its own students abroad
in an effort at Òcapacity-buildingÓ, but is also actively recruiting students
from China and Indonesia, and increasingly from Pakistan and other Islamic
countries.
The problem with equity arises not so much between the rich and the poor world
but within the developing world. As a rule, only the developing world's elites
attend foreign universities. The Ford Foundation is devoting huge resources to
putting this injustice right: in 2000 it provided $280m over 12 years—its
biggest-ever grant—for a scholarship programme to send disadvantaged
people from poor countries to leading universities abroad. Douglas Millin is, alas,
no longer with us. But if the Ford Foundation has its way, his successors will
have to deal with people from considerably farther afield than Hope, Arkansas.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
VI
<<September 15, 2005>>
Excerpted from;
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4340111
Higher
Ed Inc
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Universities have become much more businesslike, but they are still doing the
same old things
PHOTO CAPTION: The way we learn now?
THE University of Phoenix's Hohokam campus looks more like a corporate
headquarters than a regular university. There is none of the cheerful mess that
you associate with student life. The windows are made from black reflecting
glass, the corridors are neat and hushed, the grass has been recently cut,
there is plenty of parking space for everybody, and security guards in golf
carts make sure all the cars are on legitimate business. The university is
conveniently close to a couple of motorways, and ten minutes from the airport.
But the campus does not just look like a corporate headquarters; it is one. The
University of Phoenix is America's largest for-profit university (and indeed
America's largest university, full stop), with 280,000 students, 239 campuses
and various offshoots around the world, including some in China and India. The
Hohokam campus houses the corporate headquarters of the Apollo Group, the
company that owns the university, along with the group's corporate university.
The University of Phoenix was the brainchild of John Sperling, a Cambridge
educated economist turned entrepreneur. When he was teaching in San Jose State
University in the early 1970s, Mr Sperling noticed that adult students got
scant attention from universities designed to teach people aged 18-22. That, he
felt, was not only unfair but also unwise: in the new economy, workers might
have to keep going back to university to update or improve their skills.
The University of Phoenix is designed to cater for the needs of working adults,
who make up 95% of its students. The emphasis is on practical subjects, such as
business and technology, that will help them with their careers, and on fitting
in with busy schedules. One of the university's golden rules is that there
should be plenty of parking, and that students should be able to get from their
cars to their classrooms in five minutes. In the early 1990s it became the
first university to offer degrees online, and the internet is now integral to
all its teaching.
But in designing a university for working adults, Mr Sperling also introduced
two other far-reaching innovations. The first was to concentrate power in the
organisation. In traditional universities academics are semi-independent
contractors who devote as much time as possible to their own research. In
Phoenix they are simply employees. It is the university, not the teachers, that
owns the curriculum. Todd Nelson, the company's boss, claims that this has
allowed the university to become a Òlearning organisationÓ: it is constantly
improving its ability to teach by measuring performance and disseminating
successful techniques. The only research it cares about is the sort that
improves teaching.
The second innovation is to turn higher education into a business. The cost of
a year's education at Phoenix, at $9,000, is not particularly high for a
private university, but the business ethos is unusually pervasive. Mr Nelson
cheerfully talks about Òthe education industryÓ, and boasts that enrolment is
currently growing at 25% a year. The Apollo Group spent a staggering $383m on
marketing last year.
Dollars and degrees
It is hard to imagine what von Humboldt, with his belief in research for its
own sake, would make of the University of Phoenix. But for many people it is a
vision of the future. Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, regards
the triumph of the for-profit sector as inevitable, because universities Òare
run by faculty, and the faculty is interested in its own welfare.Ó
For-profit universities are finding a growing number of market niches,
particularly in America. Strayer University, one of the University of Phoenix's
biggest competitors, concentrates on telecommunications and business
administration. Concord Law School, owned by Kaplan, which in turn is owned by
the Washington Post, boasts one of the largest law-school enrolments in the
country. All of its teaching is online. Cardean University, the brainchild of
Michael Milken, offers online business education, including MBAs.
The Apollo Group's corporate university marks another big educational change.
The number of corporate universities, which provide education for their parent
companies, has grown from 400 in the mid-1980s to more than 2,000 today. Some
of these institutions, such as the McDonald's Hamburger University, do not
deserve the name, but others, such as those set up by Microsoft and Schwab, are
more serious. A growing number of corporate universities are awarding degrees
in conjunction with traditional universities.
For-profit universities are only the most dramatic example of a more general
trend: the changing balance of power between the state and the market. For much
of the 20th century the state steadily tightened its grip on universities. Now
the market is beginning to get its own back.
The old-fashioned public universities are becoming ever more promiscuous in
their pursuit of income. In America, Òpublic university Ó is fast becoming a
figure of speech. At the University of Virginia, the share of the operating
budget coming from the state declined from about 28% in 1985 to 8% in 2004. As
one university president put it, his university has evolved from being a Òstate
institutionÓ to being Òstate-supportedÓ, then Òstate assistedÓ, next
Òstate-locatedÓ and now Òstate-annoyedÓ.
In other countries too, public universities are becoming more entrepreneurial.
Increasingly they are starting to charge fees, usually in combination with
student loans. They are also transforming themselves into competitive
commercial operations when it comes to attracting fee-paying foreign students
or winning contracts with business. At the same time, new non profit private
universities are springing up. These have long been common in America, Japan
and South Korea, but used to be rare elsewhere. In Portugal, private
universities and colleges have grown from almost nothing two decades ago to
account for two-thirds of all higher-education institutions and 40% of all
students. All in all, private funding has grown faster than public funding in
seven of the eight OECD countries for which data are available.
Another eye-catching change is the rise of the internet as a way of delivering
tuition. The internet has all sorts of advantages, from lowering costs to
opening up markets. MIT has struck up an innovative alliance with two
Singaporean universities that allows Singaporean students to take part
Òvirtually Ó in MIT lectures. The Virtual University of Monterrey, Mexico, uses
a combination of teleconferencing and the internet to reach more than 70,000
students all over Latin America.
But for all the new technology and the ÒmarketisationÓ of higher education, it
is striking how little has changed. Traditional universities are raising money
not so that they can do radically new things but so that they can continue to
do the same old things. For-profit universities are undoubtedly doing an
excellent job in filling market niches, particularly for technical education,
but their position in the academic hierarchy remains humble.
The internet is producing equally modest results. However good it is for
transmitting information or reinforcing learning, e-learning is no substitute
for bricks-and-mortar universities. The e-learning bubble of the late 1990s
burst with shocking speed. Fathom, a joint venture established by Columbia and
13 other universities, libraries and museums, closed down after raising
revenues of only $700,000 in two and a half years. Caliber, the Wharton
School's e-partner, filed for bankruptcy. Temple University abandoned Virtual
Temple without offering a single course. NYU Online has also pulled the plug.
New technologies generally prompt heady predictions that they will
revolutionise higher education. Thomas Edison forecast that motion pictures
would replace campus lectures; others have made even grander claims for radio
or television. David Noble, a historian, compares the internet craze with the
fashion for correspondence schools that bubbled up in the early 20th century.
By 1919, more than 70 American universities had launched correspondence
courses, competing against some 300 private correspondence schools. But the
bubble eventually burst, partly because of poor teaching and high drop-out rates
but mainly because the human dimension was missing.
None of this is to say that the idea of the university is carved in gothic
stone. It is indeed changing, but by evolution rather than revolution. And the
most important recent development in the world of higher education has been the
creation of a super-league of global universities that are now engaged in a
battle for intellectual talent and academic prestige.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
VII
<<September 15,
2005>>
Excerpted from;
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4340083
The
best is yet to come
Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
A more market-oriented system of higher education can do much better than the
state-dominated model
PHOTO CAPTION: The way they used to learn
WILLIAM JAMES had good reason to be nervous when he turned up, back in 1869, to
be examined for his Harvard medical degree: he had spent most of the previous
three years abroad. But as luck would have it, his examiner turned out to be
Oliver Wendell Holmes, an old family friend. Dr Holmes asked the candidate a
single question and, when young William answered it correctly, drew the event
to a close: ÒThat's enough! If you know that, you must know everything. Now
tell me, how is your dear old father?Ó
For at least its first 200 years, Harvard was a finishing school for
Boston's—or at most New England's—elite. Eliots and Lowells held
leadership positions continuously for more than two centuries, and Cabots and
Lodges kept appearing on the school rolls in various permutations. But starting
in the late 19th century, Harvard gradually transformed itself into a national
university. Now the university is undergoing another dramatic transformation:
from a national to a global university.
This is not to say that Harvard is losing its American roots entirely. America
is, after all, the world's greatest marketplace for higher education, and
Harvard's very Americanness is part of its attraction. All the same, the
university is increasingly operating in a global labour market. Faculty
searches are always worldwide; in some departments 40% of PhD students come
from abroad; and the graduate and professional schools are truly multinational.
Harvard is not alone. The great universities of the 19th century were shaped by
nationalism; the great universities of today are being shaped by globalisation.
The world's higher-education system is increasingly dominated by a superleague
of world-class universities competing with each other for talent and prestige.
There is nothing new about globalism in higher education, of course. Medieval
scholars communicated in Latin and often studied at several universities in
different countries. But for a long time many academics felt that their
principal loyalty was to their university or college rather than to their
discipline. Universities were mainly schools for national bureaucrats and seminaries
for nationalist ideas.
Today there are fewer restraints on universities' natural inclination towards
internationalism. The top universities are citizens of an international
academic marketplace with one global academic currency, one global labour force
and, increasingly, one global language, English. They are also increasingly
citizens of a global economy, sending their best graduates to work for
multinational companies. The creation of global universities was spearheaded by
the Americans; now everybody else is trying to get in on the act. The current
vice-chancellor of Oxford, John Hood, hails from New Zealand, and his
counterpart at Cambridge, Alison Richard, spent 30 years teaching at Yale.
Global universities do not have to have a physical presence abroad to be worthy
of the name. Some of the world's best universities have been reluctant to set
up campuses abroad, and some of the most enthusiastic offshorers, such as
Webster University, which runs seven overseas campuses from its headquarters in
Missouri, are hardly global in the sense of having world-class faculty and the
pick of the world's graduate students. However, a growing number of the world's
top universities are getting more enthusiastic about offshoring.
It pays to be world-class
The most obvious reason for the rise of the global university is science's
appetite for money and manpower. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, for example, employs
nearly 2,400 people and spends $450m a year on research. Access to global
labour markets is needed to put together first-rate teams of researchers. But
policymakers have also begun to realise that world-class universities produce a
disproportionately large share of cutting-edge ideas and research. Look at the
University of Chicago's impact on economics, and hence on economic policy. Of
the 55 economists who have won the Nobel prize since 1969, when economics was
added to the roster, nine were teaching at the University of Chicago when they
were awarded their prizes, and another 14 either trained at Chicago or had
previously taught there.
World-class universities can also produce outsize economic benefits. The
best-known example of this is Stanford, which helped to incubate Google,
Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and many other world-changing firms. But there
are plenty of others. The University of Texas at Austin has helped to create a
high-technology cluster that employs around 100,000 people in some 1,700
companies. In 2000, the eight research universities in Boston provided a $7.4
billion boost to the region's economy, generated 264 new patents and granted
280 licences to private enterprises.
Top universities are a valuable asset in the global war for talent too.
America's great research universities enable it to recruit more foreign PhD
students than the rest of the OECD put together. And a striking number of these
people stay put: in 1998-2001, about two-thirds of foreigners who earned
American doctorates in science and engineering said they had Òfirm plansÓ to
stay, up from 57% in 1994-97.
The benefits of having global universities are now so clear that governments
around the world are obsessed with producing ÒIvy LeaguesÓ. The British are
introducing fees in part because they want their best universities to be able
to compete with the best American ones. The German Social Democratic
Party—traditionally a bastion of egalitarianism—has produced a plan
to create German equivalents of Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. And the
Chinese are hard at work trying to build world-class universities. Today ÒexcellenceÓ
is taking over from ÒexpansionÓ as the mantra of higher education.
But this academic revolution has only just begun, particularly in continental
Europe. How can you create world-class universities if your academics are civil
servants trapped in a national labour market? Only 2% of French academics are
foreign-born. The comparable figure in Switzerland, which is much more
successful at producing top universities, is 25%. Only 7% of newly hired
professors in major American universities are alumni of the institutions where
they teach. In France the figure is 50% and in Spain 95%. And how can you have
world-class universities without proper resources? Hardly any continental
European universities employ professional fund-raisers. Most do not even keep in
touch with their alumni.
The new global universities are shaking up everything from academic funding to
immigration laws. But they also manage to mix a large measure of conservatism
with their radicalism. For the most part, they are still the children of the
century-old marriage between the German research university and the British
residential university. Most of them still try to combine teaching with
research.
Over the past century, there have been various attempts to unbundle the two.
The Chinese and Russians created pure research institutes. The French trained
their elites in grandes Žcoles—professional schools that did not
emphasise research. But for the most part these alternatives have failed.
A striking number of research universities have also preserved the idea of the
academic village. A handful of hermits apart, most scholars prefer to live in a
community of scholars in which academic and social life are melded together,
preferably in beautiful surroundings. James Watson's account of a walk in
Cambridge after he and Francis Crick discovered the double helix of DNA makes
the point perfectly:
I slowly walked toward the Clare Bridge, staring up at the gothic pinnacles of
the King's College Chapel that stood out sharply against the spring sky. I
briefly stopped and looked over the perfect Georgian features of the recently
cleaned Gibbs Building, thinking that much of our success was due to the long,
uneventful periods when we walked among the colleges or unobtrusively read the
new books that came into Heffer's Bookstore.
European universities these days are given to nostalgia. Professors reminisce
about an age when public money was plentiful, governments left them alone and
academics were part of the ruling class. Students remember when the government
picked up the tab for tuition and living costs. And almost everybody complains
that quality has declined.
In reality, though, that golden age was never quite as wonderful as it is now
made out to be. The public universities were never as democratic or egalitarian
as they seemed. The justification of offering free higher education is that
nobody should be denied it on cost grounds. But in practice the children of the
privileged have long been much more likely to get into university than the
children of the poor. The result was perverse: in the name of equality, all
taxpayers were forced to subsidise the privileged.
These public universities often spiced de-facto elitism with anti-business
snobbery. Many universities were not just reluctant to be Òknowledge
factoriesÓ; they were antagonistic to the capitalist economy. Oxford and
Cambridge long resisted the study of practical subjects such as business or
engineering; instead, they specialised in turning the sons of businessmen into
educated gentlemen. This anti-business bias reached its apogee in the 1960s,
when many of the current generation of dons got their jobs.
In the long run, the universities' deal with the state proved to be a bargain
with the devil. In the days when universities were restricted to elites, the
bargain worked well enough for the few; hence the nostalgia. But the moment
that academia embarked on massification, this gentlemanly bargain broke down.
Universities were forced to do more with less because the government faced lots
of competing demands for funds. And academics were increasingly treated like
other public servants—and held accountable for their use of public money.
PHOTO CAPTION: Wanted: 21st-century Humboldts
The more market-oriented model of higher education that has been pioneered in
the United States, and is gradually spreading to much of the rest of the world,
has four big advantages over the public model. First, it is better at combining
equity with excellence. America sends a higher proportion of poor school-leavers
to college than, say, Germany, which justifies its free universities by
claiming they offer universal access. Second, it is better at producing a
diverse system that stretches from the Ivy League to community colleges.
Governments can engineer differentiation in higher education, but
state-sponsored differentiation tends to degenerate into academic apartheid.
Third, the market model is much more sustainable than the public-sector model.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never very sensible; it is particularly
silly if you belong to an elitist institution that comes low in the pecking
order for public resources. Fourth, serving many masters gives universities
much more control over their own destiny than being beholden to a single
patron.
That is not to say that the transition to a more market-oriented system will be
easy. Countries will have to solve the problem of social justice by allowing
students to borrow against their future incomes. They will also have to cope
with a host of new problems that come along with newly liberated markets. How
do you prevent the erosion of the intellectual commons (for example, by
companies preventing ÒtheirÓ scholars from publishing commercially sensitive
material)? How do you regulate foreign universities? How do you deal with
differences in national standards? How do you prevent outright cheating, such
as selling degrees? These are serious problems. But they pose far less of a
threat to universities than the slow starvation that accompanies public
funding.
Empires of the mind
There are two other big reasons to be optimistic about universities. The first
is the way they are increasingly regarded as the engines of the knowledge
economy. This means that all sorts of people—from governments to
companies to students—have a big incentive to keep investing in them. The
second is that universities—particularly global research
universities—have achieved such striking successes in advancing
knowledge. To be sure, their recent record in the humanities has been decidedly
mixed; but the sciences have never been healthier. For the people who are
mapping the genome or looking for a cure for cancer, arguably the golden age of
the university is now.
Noel Annan, the very embodiment of the British academic establishment, once
said that universities Òexist to cultivate the intellect. Everything else is
secondary.Ó The most precious gift that universities can offer is to live and
work among books and laboratories, he argued; and the most important lesson
they can teach is how to use the intellect:
A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students
the struggle—and the disappointments as well as the triumphs of that
struggle—to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of
order won by the intellect.
Three cheers to that. There are plenty of justifications for the revolution
that is sweeping through higher education, most notably in the United States.
It is giving students more control over where they get educated. It is giving
millions of youngsters a chance to spend their formative years abroad. It is
throwing up colleges that can teach managerial and technical skills. It is
reconnecting academics with the wider knowledge economy. But the most important
justification of all is that it is freeing resources for intellectual activity.
It is filling libraries with books. It is stocking laboratories with equipment.
And it is giving more researchers than ever before a chance to produce order
out of chaos.
Von Humboldt's university with its emphasis on research was one of the
transformative institutions of the 19th century. The emerging global university
is set to be one of the transformative institutions of the current era. All it
needs is to be allowed to flourish.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
ATTACHMENT
VIII
> From: Tapio Varis <Tapio.Varis@uta.fi>
> Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 05:58:23 +0300
> To: <utsumi@columbia.edu>
> Subject: Tapio«s presentation in UNEVOC Centre in Bonn
>
> Dear Tak,
>
> I will speak tomorrow in UNEVOC Unesco Centre tomorrow. There will be
> 40 invited experts and the assistant Director General of Education,
> too. Enclosed you find my slides where I mention GUS, too.
>
> tapio
List
of Distribution
Professor Seth G. Neugroschl
Co-chair Columbia University Seminar on Computers, Man and Society
Columbia University
1349 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10128
212-876-7674
SN23@columbia.edu
Dr. Edward A. Friedman
Director
Center for Technology Management in Global Development
Professor of Technology Management
Stevens Institute of Technology
Castle Point on Hudson
Hoboken, NJ 07030
201-216-5188
Fax: 201-216-8069
EIES No. 1871
FRIEDMAN@STEVENS-TECH.EDU
friedman@stevens.edu>
http://howe.stevens.edu/global
Prof. Stuart A. Umpleby
Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning
School of Business
Monroe Hall 403
The George Washington University
2101 F Street NW, Suite 201
Washington, DC 20052, USA
Tel: (202) 994-1642
Fax: (202) 994-4930
fax 202-994-3081
umpleby@gwu.edu
http://www.gwu.edu/~umpleby
http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2005/index.htm
P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor
Acting President, Global University System
UNESCO Chair in Global e-Learning with applications to multiple domains
Professor and Chair of Media Education
Research Center for Vocational Education & Hypermedia Laboratory
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 229
FIN-13101 Hameenlinna
FINLAND
Tel: +358-3-614-5608--office in Hameenlinna
Tel: +358-3-215 6243--mass media lab in Tampere
GSM: +3358-50-567-9833
Fax: +358-3-614-5611
tapio.varis@uta.fi
tapio.varis@hamk.fi
tapio.varis@helsinki.fi
http://www.uta.fi/titava
www.ecml-eu.org -- about ECML project.
http://www.uta.fi/conference/mediaskills/
**********************************************************************
* Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D., P.E., Chairman, GLOSAS/USA
*
* (GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.) *
* Laureate of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education *
* Founder and V.P. for Technology and Coordination of
*
* Global University System (GUS)
*
* 43-23 Colden Street, Flushing, NY 11355-5913, U.S.A.
*
* Tel: 718-939-0928; Email: utsumi@columbia.edu
*
* http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/
*
* Tax Exempt ID: 11-2999676
*
**********************************************************************