Until now, college in many nations was cheaper than a book in the U.S.
By COLIN WOODARD
When Hungarians want to protest, they go to Lajos Kossuth Square, in front of the Parliament building, a 691-room edifice described by the poet Gyula Illyes as a "Turkish bath crossed with a Gothic chapel."
Its spires and flying
buttresses have witnessed events that signaled the ends of wars and the rise and fall of Communism.
But in recent years, mass protests at Kossuth Square were about something else: university tuition. Hungarian students said that they didn't want any, and that the future of the nation was at stake.
For the time being, at least, they have won. A government initiative to charge tuition was reversed in 1998, to the consternation of the World Bank and many education experts who had supported the policy.
"Hungary has had free education for more than 50 years, and it's a democratic principle that everyone should have free access to higher education," says Kinga Joo, a member of the presidium of the National Union of Students in Hungary, which organized the protests against turning college education into a "market economy" and says it stands ready to do so again.
In a little-noticed global trend, pressures have built up in countries around the world over the past decade to jack up tuition and impose fees. From Britain to Thailand, from China to South Africa, governments are turning to parents and students to generate revenue for cash-strapped public-university systems.
In many of these countries, unlike the United States, tuition has always been cheaper than a textbook, and so the change in the financing of higher education has been traumatic. The protesters in Hungary have had plenty of company. Last April, students opposed to the introduction of fees began an occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shutting down the campus for nine and a half months and forcing administrators to abandon the tuition plan. Ghana scuttled a tuition hike in October, after protesters closed down the University of Ghana. In January, Canadian students held strikes and protests across the country to fight tuition increases. In Britain, such protests have become a regular event over the past year, and in Israel, students went on a six-week national strike in 1998.
But scholars of higher education say higher tuition and fees are inevitable -- the result of social and economic realities confronting the vast majority of world's nations. Only imposing or increasing tuition, scholars say, balanced with some form of financial aid to provide access for the poor, will put countries' higher education systems on an even economic keel.
The root cause of the pressure on the cost of college is the surge in demand for higher education worldwide. Over the past two decades, as national populations have risen, so has the proportion that completes secondary school. That trend, coupled with a job market that keeps raising the bar in education, has created an enormous increase in the need for college-level training. But in most countries, public financing of higher education hasn't kept pace with that need, because of declining budgets and competing national goals.
"You have this dramatically increased demand for higher education coupled with a decreased capacity of governments to fund the sector," says D. Bruce Johnstone, a professor of education leadership and policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who studies the issue. "If you don't introduce some kind of cost sharing, then you're left with two bad choices: You can resist demand and let your public higher education become increasingly elite and inaccessible, or you let the system decline for lack of funding."
"Country after country has decided as a matter of policy that they don't want to spend the money to publicly support these expanded enrollments," says Philip G. Altbach, director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education.
"Policymakers have decided they want the user -- that is, parents and families -- to pay more for this product. Tuition is the easiest and most logical way to do this."
Jamil Salmi, coordinator of the World Bank's Tertiary Education Group, based in Washington, says finances, rather than changing ideas, are driving the change: "It's a response to more-difficult times."
In Australia, the government has adopted a middle course between letting public universities charge whatever they want and giving in to student protests.
Tuition used to be nonexistent at Australia's public universities. But in 1989, rising enrollments prompted the Labor government to begin charging tuition to generate revenue. Students were charged about 25 percent of the average cost of each course; most chose a government plan that allowed them to pay tuition after they graduate. Former students have to start making payments on tuition debt after they earn more than about $12,000 annually.
Despite tuition, enrollments continued to rise -- by about 125 percent between 1990 and 1996, when the new, conservative government sharply increased tuition at public universities, to between $1,940 and $3,200, depending on the field of study.
Last year, David Kemp, the Education Minister, tried to introduce reforms that would allow universities to charge as much as they wanted, but abandoned the plan following widespread protests. He hasn't given up. "We are encouraging greater flexibility on the part of universities, reducing their dependence on government and leading them to greater autonomy and self-reliance as customer-focused enterprises," he told reporters recently.
In China, higher-education enrollment jumped from one million students in the early 1980's to six million in 1998, a figure that still represents only 7 percent of the college-age population, according to Min Weifang, executive vice president of Peking University, in Beijing. As enrollment grew, however, state appropriations failed to keep pace with rising costs, and the squeeze on university budgets resulted in understocked libraries and dilapidated laboratories, forcing institutions to seek revenue through tuition and commercial ventures, such as research for hire.
China imposed tuition of $890 in 1998-99 -- a hefty sum in a country where the annual per-capita income is less than $680. More increases may be on the way, officials say, but they have asked colleges to set aside 10 percent of tuition fees to give poor students part-time jobs.
Since the Asian financial crisis, Thailand's public universities have been under considerable pressure to make themselves more self-sufficient. With universities creating a steady drain on the national treasury, a new National Education Act will encourage public universities to raise tuition starting in October 2001. In subtle Thai style -- and perhaps in an effort to avoid national protests -- the government makes raising tuition a decision for each university to make on its own.
Over the past three years, the percentage of educational costs that most Thai students pay at public universities has increased from a range of 3 to 5 percent to a range of 10 to 15 percent, according to the Ministry of University Affairs. That means they are paying up to $540 a year, in a country in which the annual per-capita income is $1,894, with taxpayers picking up the rest of the tab. (Some graduate students and students at a few elite institutions pay even more.)
Sumeth Yamnoon, director of the Bureau of Policy and Planning at the university-affairs ministry, says its budget for the country's 28 public universities has shrunk slightly -- not because the government is pushing the institutions to be autonomous, but because in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the money simply isn't there.
In most of the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, colleges are on their knees, as a result of the insolvency of the governments that once covered their costs. "In some places the system isn't poor, it has simply collapsed," says Peter Darvas, a World Bank education economist.
The constitutions of most countries in both regions guarantee free higher education to those who receive top grades in standardized entrance exams. In the face of declining revenue, however, many governments devised a loophole: Public institutions could expand by accepting students who scored lower on the exams but were able to pay tuition. "You pay or you don't pay for your studies based on one exam score. How fair is that?" asks Lazar Vlasceanu, deputy director of the European Center for Higher Education, in Bucharest, Romania, part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
In Romania, such a system has made the country's universities a home for students from well-to-do families. The capacity of the colleges has tripled since Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator, was overthrown a decade ago, with 3 in 10 students studying at new, private institutions that only the wealthy can afford. At public universities, all students who score well on the entrance exam still get in for free, but tuition-paying students come from the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. The annual tuition is equal to four months of the average person's salary, Mr. Vlasceanu says. No loans or scholarships are available, he adds.
Over all, the proportion of underprivileged students who scored high enough to get in without paying tuition at public institutions has shrunk from around 30 percent to just under 10 percent. The student body is also still disproportionately urban.
"So, when looking at the use of public funds, the poor are paying for the rich to get a better education and consolidate their privilege," says Mr. Vlasceanu. Meanwhile, he says, the talents of many who cannot afford to go to college are being wasted.
The situation is no better in formerly socialist countries that didn't sidestep their constitutions by allowing universities to admit both state-financed and tuition-paying students. "If you don't have tuition, then teachers ask for money under the table from the students in order to pass exams or enroll in classes," says Mr. Darvas, of the World Bank.
"Whether there's tuition or not, few students are able to afford the costs of books, living expenses, and bribes," says Rhett Bowlin, deputy director of the Soros Network's Higher Education Support Project, an Eastern European extension of the New York City-based foundation. "Corruption in Kyrgyzstan is so extreme that in [the capital] Bishkek, the cost of grades at different levels is not only common knowledge, it's actually advertised in the newspapers."
Education-policy analysts say one solution to the financing woes is to charge everyone tuition. In theory, a portion of the tuition collected can be used to pay for means-tested grants or subsidized loans, and that, in turn, would maintain or improve access for poor and middle-income students. The problem is, many countries are hesitant to pass legislation to do that. "I tell the governments I work with that you can't look at tuition independently from student aid," says Mr. Salmi, of the World Bank. "I think any country can create a student-aid program if they're serious about it. The technical challenges aren't that great. The problem is that many societies don't have the political will to discriminate against the children of the rich."
Some societies do have that will. In Israel, the Ministry of Finance managed to fight off a tuition cut by portraying students as "spoiled rich kids who were asking for government money." Following an unsuccessful student strike, the government is still struggling to come up with more financial aid.
Other obstacles can block the use of financial aid to help students meet newly imposed or increased tuition. Assessing a student's financial need can be difficult in many parts of the world. In the United States, qualification for financial aid can be determined by means of income-tax returns, but in many countries, such data either don't exist, or the government doesn't have easy access to the records. In some countries, the level of compliance with income-tax rules is so low that the information is highly unreliable.
Ways exist around these obstacles, however. The American University in Kyrgyzstan, for example, had to be creative in assessing student needs to create its aid programs. Founded in Bishkek in 1997, the private university charges $800 to $1,400 a year -- a sum that only the wealthy can afford. Financial aid is available, but with few income statistics to work with, administrators have to call employers to confirm parental income. Confirming assets is pretty much impossible.
So administrators keep their eyes open. "For the most part the system works, because the community is small and people know who everyone is," says Mr. Bowlin, of the Higher Education Support Project, in Budapest, which helped set up the university's program for students. "After a while an administrator can tell how poor they are based on their lifestyle or how they dress."
Recovering loans after graduation can be tricky, too, but it is an essential part of a country's plan to balance tuition with financial aid.
South Africa's public universities are currently owed $107-million in tuition by past and current students.
Using their own money, students make a tuition deposit in February or March, at the beginning of the academic year, and are supposed to pay all of their tuition by June, the middle of their academic year. Many universities insist that students pay off past debts before starting a new academic year.
The country faces a yawning gulf between the imperative of access and the inability of many families to pay fees, says Colin Bundy, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.
To try to improve access to poor students, the country set up a National Student Financial Aid Scheme. To improve the plan's ability to recover loans, the government now makes employers take loan-payments out of employees' salaries.
As colleges around the world fight to support themselves without excluding low-income students, many countries may take a look at South Africa's and Australia's experiments with using employers to enforce student-loan collection.
In the end, says Mr. Johnstone, of Buffalo, many countries will find that combining steeper tuition with strong financial aid is the best way to pay for the increased capacity of their colleges, while at the same time insuring equitable access. "You just can't have one without the other."
Tony Gillotte, Geoffrey Maslen, and Linda Vergnani contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Page: A54