More on private higher education globally

I commented recently on "A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education", by John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic, which describes the inroads that for-profit higher education is making around the world.  I thought I should see what Daniel C. Levy and his excellent  Program for Research on Private Higher Education might have to say on the matter, and discovered that he has a recent working paper entitled An Introductory Global Overview: The Private Fit to Salient Higher Education Tendencies.  This paper concentrates on the non-profit side of private higher ed, but he notes “most of the findings we have identified as characteristics of private higher education are even more striking for the for-profit institutions.”.  I also note that Levy has a number of databases looking at private higher education available on his website.

I will not try to describe all of his findings from this report, but rather suggest that you go to his paper. Instead, I will comment on a few of his findings that I found most interesting and provocative.

Levy estimates that about one-fourth of total higher education enrollment worldwide might now be in private colleges and universities (both for- and non-profit).  This represents a great change compared to the middle of the last century, when states had a virtual monopoly over higher education in most countries. Overall, of course, the number of students going into higher education has increased greatly over the past decades, as has the number of educational institutions. Demands of the developing knowledge economy, population growth, increased social mobility, rising standards of living, etc. have driven that overall growth.  Interestingly, Levy finds that in several areas of the world - primarily the developing countries- newer private institutions are playing a major role in absorbing this new demand.  The Anglophone African nations, most Latin American countries, and a number of Asian countries all have a significant minority of private institutions, or, in a surprising number of cases, an actual majority.  Among the more dynamic Asian economies, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all already have a strong majority of all higher education students in private institutions.  In most countries, he finds that the number one choice of students is probably still a public institution, but the number two choice is increasingly private.

Levy finds that most of the private institutions (outside of the US ) do not include significant graduate education and research.  Where there is graduate education, it is primarily in job-related areas, such as business. This result makes a lot of sense to me, given the very high net cost of creating doctoral education and the associated research.  Research-active faculty participate in a world market, where teaching faculty participate in local markets.   In the US, this leads to more than a 35% “research differential” for faculty salaries at doctoral institutions compared to those at non-doctoral institutions (both non-profit).  The differential would undoubtedly be larger if for profit higher education salaries were also included.  In addition, research active faculty generally teach less than teaching faculty, thus increasing the total faculty costs per student for  institutions that seek to create a significant research profile.  Research itself is almost always a money-loser, once all costs are factored in (social science research may sometimes be an exception to this rule).  So creating a new private institution that included significant, high quality graduate education and research would be a really heavy lift, involving enormous up-front costs. A for-profit higher education institution is highly unlikely to have any interest in research and graduate education (other than those areas that are primarily job training, where there could be a robust paying market).  Doug Becker, Chairman and CEO of Laureate, described well the for-profit view in this area in his 2004 Pullias Lecture at USC (see also my comments on this lecture and my associated lecture For profit and/or non profit future? Feb.20, 2006).

Levy notes a high percentage of part-time faculty in the private higher education sector.  On a country-by-country basis, he finds the percentage of part-timers in the private sector almost invariably to be higher than in the public sector.  This large mix of part time faculty, often working for several institutions, can contribute to the quality problems that sometime plague these newer institutions. This finding adds an interesting dimension to the quality issue that whirls around many of these newer private institutions.  While there are a few examples of established high quality institutions that use a heavy mix of part-time faculty ( the Open University comes to mind), it is clear that special attention must be paid in order to use part-time faculty appropriately. The overall quality issue is obviously a key part of the cost/profit relationship that will need to be addressed by many of these new higher education players if they are to survive.  Quality was also a big issue in the discussion by Daniel, et al.

Levy also points out that the great majority of private higher education focuses on local markets and local reputation, seldom seeking broader visibility.   They are generally focused on absorbing excess demand that cannot be met by local state institutions. Interestingly, however, he finds that the relatively few  private institutions that are nearer to the academic top are likely to be more international in scope than are their near public competitors because the privates are less attached to, and dependent on,  local governments and regions.  This is a very interesting insight, one that can have important implications as international higher education partnerships evolve. 

I particularly like Levy’s brief discussion of the search for legitimacy by private higher education. Public institutions gain legitimacy in large part through their establishment and support by the state.  Private institutions must seek to gain legitimacy in other ways.  This question of legitimacy is particularly important for the newer institutions that do not have a history of quality that leads to degree recognition.  Obviously, there is a catch-22 here, because such things as degree recognition come when many graduates are able to demonstrate the high value of their education, but good people are not likely to attend an institution that does not have degree recognition.  He notes that many of these private institutions seek legitimacy through non-national agencies, such as US accreditation, and highlight their international roots and models.  Because of this international focus, he makes the interesting suggestion that the graduates of the best of these private institutions may be more desirable to the private global marketplace than are the graduates of the better ranked but more inward looking public institutions.   In reading this, I thought of Korea University, one of the major private universities in South Korea, and Seoul National, the flagship public university.  Korea University has determined that it will teach two-thirds of its classes in English by 2010 and is currently at 30%+; Seoul National is in the 10% range, and has not announced a higher target.  One could well imagine the market would most appreciate the KU students, and indeed, its graduates have the best employment rates nationwide.  As a reality check, however, the faculty of Korea University recently voted to not consider current President Euh for reelection, with his push for English being one of the major factors.  One of the perils of leadership!

One other note. Levy uses the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings of the most prestigious universities globally as a basis for some of his analysis.  I admit being enormously skeptical of the value of such rankings.  They tend to try to rank universities using prioritized metrics that are valuable to the universities themselves - not necessarily those of value to their students, or to the societies in which they exist.  Not surprisingly, the metrics used tend to be those that most describe the most successful and visible universities in the world today - those in the US. Obviously, some universities are indeed better than others by almost any set of metrics.  However, once you are looking at “serious” universities, choosing “better” becomes an exercise in rather arbitrary definition of the word, rather than an analysis of what is better for a particular region at a particular time. 

Gavin Moodie, writing in Australia's On Line Opinion, points out that a society may not be best served by pumping money into universities in an effort to create typically “world class” institutions.  He wrote:”Knowledge and information abound; it is the capacity to use them productively that is in scarce supply. As distinguished science policy expert Michael Gibbons argues, much innovation, and hence economic development, depends less on original discoveries and more on the timely take-up, modification and marketing of knowledge solutions that already exist but need to be adapted to local environments. This is no more likely to emerge from the elite research institutions than from any others. This is a radically different orientation to cultivating research esteem that is more often judged by the interests and values of other researchers, not those who may use it. Japan is the great exemplar. Its powerful manufacturing sector is supported by a very vigorous national innovation system, but it has a relatively low number of world-class universities, as Professor Simon Marginson of Monash University has pointed out, and relatively few Nobel laureates.”   In this world in which scientific breakthroughs are immediately known globally, having a university that turns out first class business men and women, entrepreneurs, and people who are good at tech transfer may be much smarter than having yet one more university dedicated to making those breakthroughs.

Thus, as one looks at the developing world of higher education (private and public), one should ask what types of institutions best serve the needs of the region, rather than which most closely copy the older and more visible universities of the United States.

Comments

[RamonGustav]

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