Joseph
Aoun, the president of Northeastern University, recently published a very
insightful article entitled Two different leaders, two different visions in the
Huffington Post. His two leaders are
Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France, and Luke Ravenstahl, the mayor of Pittsburgh. Their
visions allow us to consider how education may be viewed in different versions
of the developing market-state as described by Philip Bobbitt (Welcome to the market state, Feb 2006).
Sarkozy recently announced that he wants to invest more
than $29B in France’s universities and research, with a clear rationale and goal:
France is giving herself
unprecedented resources in order to have world’s best universities because with
the world’s best universities we are preparing ourselves to win the
competitiveness battle.
Ravenstahl, on the other hand, announced that
he wants to tax college and university tuitions. His rationale and goal are
also clear:
It’s time for everybody to pay
their fair share, especially if we are to complete our financial recovery. We
can no longer afford to provide city services to those who are not paying their
fair share.
The money is needed to help
cover $15 million in higher pension costs, plus contribute $1 million to
Carnegie Libraries to keep neighborhood branches from closing.
As Aoun points out, these two leaders provide a very different conception of the role of higher education in the world. Both fit the view of the Bobbitt’s market state, which I have discussed often before, but with very different perspectives. Sarkozy believes that higher education is a critical resource to be used by the state in its global economic battles, and so serves as a public good requiring state support. Ravenstahl’s proposal reflects a belief that higher education is a private good which should be expected to pay its way, and not depend on special breaks from the state. The role of the market is clear in both proposals, and neither is proposing to treat higher education in the traditional nation state role as being worthy of state support because it provides a general, unspecified public good such as producing better citizens.
Bobbitt suggested that each market state will be some combination of three possible forms: (1) a mercantile state-i.e. one that endeavors to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) and entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absolute position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocks, etc.). As I point out below, the Sarkozy approach is consistent with some of the characteristics Bobbitt describes for the managerial state, while that of Ravenstahl fits characteristics of the entrepreneurial state.
*****
Sarkozy
consistently has made reform of research and higher education a key element of his
government’s programs. For whatever
value rankings have, the 2009 ARWU rankings of world universities shows 11
top 100 institutions in Great Britain, 5 in Germany, and only 3 in France – a
result that cannot find favor in the Elysee Palace! An article in the Economist described the
situation in French
higher education in the following way:
There are no tuition fees, nor is
selection of students on entry allowed, apart from the required baccalauréat.
Lecture halls are swamped; first-year medical students camp out early for
scarce places. Campus libraries close at weekends. As many as 52% of
undergraduates fail after their first year; and 90,000 students quit university
each year without a degree. France's brightest students compete for places at
the elite, fee-paying universities, known as the grandes écoles,
instead. And the best researchers snap up well-financed jobs abroad.
Even softening this
statement a bit by taking into account the usual British/French competitive
spirit, one can imagine why Sarkozy has made higher education reform a high
priority.
A
major goal of the proposed reforms has been to make changes that will lead to
improved economic results for France. To
that end, many of the reforms seek to bring about closer links between universities
and business. That view, plus some reforms that potentially might lead to
inequalities between institutions and students, have resulted in massive opposition from
faculty, students, and administration. This opposition led to a 4 month higher education strike
by those groups last spring. Most of the
participants seem to actively decry some aspect of the current system, but nevertheless
are dead set against change.
Reactions by these groups
to Sarkozy’s recent promise of increased investment (in them) have been decidedly
mixed. In part, this is because one goal of his proposal flies in the face of egalite:
create around ten campuses where we excel, with the resources,
critical size and links with industry allowing them to rival the world’s best
universities.
Thus, Sarkozy must not
only find the financial resources to improve the system, but must face major
political obstacles to bring about needed organizational change. It is not easy to build a robust world-class
educational system, even when you start with all of the strengths of the
present French system! Nevertheless, this
top-down approach to educational reform in support of competitive economic
position reflects well what Bobbitt described as:
an omnicompetent government characteristic of managerial market
states.
*****
On the other hand, Pittsburgh
already is in the enviable position of having 2 universities in that ARWU top 100
ranking (U. of Pittsburg and Carnegie Mellon). Almost as good as all of France!
Taxing the tuitions of those and other higher education institutions will not
destroy them, of course. It will make it
harder for them to maintain – and increase - the levels of excellence that they
currently have. So why would the city
take that approach to filling in a hole in an underfunded pension fund? There
are certainly local conditions that explain part of it, such as Pittsburgh’s
declining population and serious, multi-year
budget problems.
But Pittsburgh is going to
need its higher education complex to be even more robust if the city is to find increased
traction in an increasingly complex world.
Wikipedia (recently - changes often of course) described Pittsburgh’s economy as “largely based on healthcare, education, technology, robotics, and financial services.” With
the possible exception of financial services, those areas sound like the core
strengths of Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon.
It is hard to imagine that these areas would have become the drivers of
the Pittsburgh economy in the absence of those two universities – and it is
highly unlikely that these areas of the economy will be able to increase in
vitality if Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon are not thriving themselves. Pittsburgh
already has what France is striving to create – a thriving, creative higher
education system. That system will be very hard to rebuild if it is damaged to
solve an unrelated problem.
Nevertheless, in the emerging market state, higher education must
expect that it will be required to supplement its current indirect role in the
economic health of its region and its nation with a more explicitly direct
role. Paying taxes might be one such direct role, but is unlikely to be the
most effective, for reasons stated above. Fortunately, in late December, Mayor
Ravenstahl announced that he was dropping plans for the tax in order to pursue
an undefined partnership of the city with higher education and the business
community that will address the financial health of the city. This type of collaborative partnership, if
pursued actively and effectively, could become one model for the type of direct
market-state role that best fits the strengths of higher education. That is a
much better way to use American higher education to help balance budgets than
taxing their resources!
Bobbitt described the entrepreneurial state as being characterized
by, among others, decentralization, economic evaluation of all policy, and
encouragement of the locality as laboratory.
In a laboratory, of course, some experiments will be badly designed, and
this looks like one of them. The
economic evaluation was short sighted and would most likely have led to larger
future deficits for the city. On the
other hand, the experiment still will be a success if some new and more
effective coupling of higher education to government and business emerges. Certainly
this local experiment would not have been tolerated in the more centralized
managerial state – a tuition tax would be national, nor not at all. But it will
probably be through such local clashes that models of effective partnerships that
serve the demands of the market state will be developed.
*****
Aoun steps back from the focus on these two leaders to look at the wider scale of the world, and finds much of the rest of the world on one side, and the US on the other. As noted before in these posts, many other countries (think much of Europe and Asia) have articulated policies outlining the role of higher education in their economies, and even in their foreign policies. As a consequence, they are creating strategies to strengthen their systems of higher education so that they can play their desired roles. The US, on the other hand, seems to assume that its higher education system will always be globally pre-eminent and that the enormous role it has played in both the economic vigor of the US, and the shaping the external perception of the US will continue unabated without attention. At the same time, there are ample signals that the pre-eminence of American higher education is rapidly eroding. Some of this erosion is to be expected – higher education is a growth area around the world as living standards increase. However, other aspects of the erosion can be attributed to the fact that we as a nation are simply not paying attention to the long term.
Bobbitt warns of a danger associated with an
entrepreneurial state:
The
entrepreneurial state may become so intoxicated with its own absolute position
that it fails to prepare itself – by not deferring consumption in order to
invest in infrastructure – for relative challenges from states whose
competitive drive is masked by the improved wealth positions of all major
players.
Sounds
like a fair warning in this case!
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