STEPHEN P. HEYNEMAN

Stephen P. Heyneman is professor of international educationalpolicy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Afrequent contributor to professional journals, his experienceincludes 22 years with the World Bank and travels to dozensof countries.

Global influences have affected many aspects ofdaily life, and hence our strategies for coping. Inthe 1970s, for example, it was common to relyon government finance to stimulate economic growth.Today private investment outstrips foreign aid and publicassistance.It was once also common to make industrial decisionson the basis of suppliers located nearby who speak one’sown language. Today industrial decisions are madeon the basis of worldwide comparative advantage. Acomputer assembly plant may be located in Nashville,Tennessee; Northern Ireland; or Malaysia; a textile plantin Bangalore, India, or Sonora, Mexico; a for winter fruit in Florida, Chile, or Morocco.

AMBITIONS FOR EDUCATION
Global influences also affect higher education.Today virtually every country has three higher educationambitions. First is a demand for greater levels of access,and in every part of the world access to higher educationis rising rapidly.

In the late 1960s, there was no nation inWestern Europe where the proportion of the age group inhigher education (18 to 22) was greater than 8 percent;today there is no nation in Western Europe where theproportion in higher education is lower than 35 percent.Worldwide enrollment is growing between 10 and 15percent per year, including in middle- and low-incomecountries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.The result: There are few parts of the world wherehigher education constitutes “elite” education, that is,where it reaches less than 15 percent of the age cohort.Higher education has become “mass education.”Enrollment at Universidad Nacional Autónoma deMéxico is 269,000; the University of Delhi has 309,000students; Anatolian University (Turkey) has over onemillion; and enrollment at what may be the world’slargest private university, the Islamic Azad Universityin Iran, with its 145 campuses, is 850,000 students.The traditional image we may have of higher educationinstitutions as cloistered retreats from the world educatinga select few may have to change.

The fact is that highereducation today is often impersonal—long lines to enterantiquated lecture halls, libraries with many missingbooks, cracking walls, falling paint, leaky faucets.The second ambition in every country is to improvethe quality of higher education. Over the last decadethere has been a revolution in the criteria that help define higher educationquality. Highqualityhighereducation nowrequires electronicmodernity inclassrooms, dorms,libraries, sciencelaboratories, studyhalls. Students areoften older, workpart time, and livefar away from thecampus. Highqualitysyllabi areno longer based ontextbooks but onthe most up-todateinformationfrom print andelectronic sources.Informationfor students isscanned andavailable online.Students haveaccess to curricularinformationwherever they liveor travel.What’s more, classroom instruction has changed.

Class time is no longer devoted to providing informationfor students; instead it is devoted to the analysis ofinformation absorbed prior to class. The Internet andother forms of electronic information have changed theacademic library and enhanced its quality. There is lessneed for faculty or students to visit the physical place.A high-quality academic library used to be defi ned bythe quantity of its holdings. Today it is defi ned by thequantity of its access to information. The differenceis enormous. Every high-quality academic library hasenough money to join exclusive “information networks”where holdings are shared with one another.

Networks of academic libraries are transnational,and cover university libraries in Europe, Asia, andNorth America. Access to information is what separatesthe excellent libraries from the mediocre. All academicservices, both teaching and bibliographic, are deliveredthough broadband facilities. Rankings of universities,in fact, nowinclude the sizeof a university’sbandwidth (seeaccompanyingchart). Universitieswith low bandwidthcannot competein quality withuniversities withlarge bandwidth.A thirdcommon ambitionof universitiesworldwide is toimprove equity,that is, to offerscholarships andfellowships tothe able studentsfrom impoverishedfamilies ordisadvantagedregions. Many fi rstclassuniversitieswill have enoughresources to offerscholarships toabout one studentin three, over and above what may be available throughpublic resources.

FINANCIAL RESOURCES
But all three ambitions, taken together, are expensive,and there are few countries where all three can be fi nancedout of public resources alone. With the increase in studentnumbers and rising expectations for quality and equity,public resources are insuffi cient. The scarcity of publicresources is likely to be permanent, and this poses a globaldilemma: How can higher education successfully fi nanceits own objectives, including its traditional objectives forserving the public good?

This dilemma pertains to both public and privateinstitutions. Public universities in the United States,for instance, now receive only 15 to 20 percent of theirrecurrent budgets from the state legislatures; the universityitself is responsible for raising the remainder, hencemaking high-quality public and private universities similar in their management objectives and strategies. So far as Iam aware, all universities have four categories of choices towhich they can turn for funding:They can raise revenue from traditional sources(such as by raising fees, charging rent for facilities, andincreasing overheads);They can diversify into new sources of revenue(such as by establishing copyrights on inventions orinvesting in equity markets);

They can allocate current resources more efficiently(for instance, by shifting from line item to block funding,differentiating faculty salaries and so forth); or• They can eliminate programs or services that areoutdated (e.g., domestic science).All the choicesare controversial.High-qualityuniversities are notonly successful atraising resources,but are wise in thereallocation of theresources they raiseto help preserve theirpublic-good function.Different institutionsdiffer, of course, inhow successful theyare in financing theirown objectives.

Someare slow because theymay not yet recognizethat to be of highquality, all universitiesnow have to take finance and management into their ownhands.Some might see this trend as a “commercialization”of higher education. Others may see it as the globalizationof an “American model” of higher education. I see thisnecessity for maximizing resources differently. I wouldcharacterize this not as commercialization but as theprofessionalization of higher education in its legitimatepursuit of excellence, and not as an American model butas the successful model in which all higher education mustparticipate in order to address what is now a universaldilemma of public resource scarcity.

SOCIAL COHESION
There is one other global influence on highereducation that deserves to be mentioned, and that is theway in which higher education contributes to (or hinders)a nation’s social cohesion. Both private and public highereducation have roles to play in helping to ensure thatcitizens live at peace with each other and with theirneighbors, and that their graduates are technically able toperform in the labor market up to expectations.Whether the primary purpose is for teaching,research, or vocational preparation, all universities attemptto influence a community’s social cohesion through twomechanisms. One mechanism is through their curriculumand professionalismin teaching history,culture, biology,physics, engineering,and ecology. Highqualityuniversitiesare defined by theiropenness to theworld’s literature andevidence, providedfreely to all studentson as many topicsas feasible.

No greatuniversity restrictsaccess to information.The second wayis the manner bywhich a universitymodels goodbehavior and exhibitsprofessional standards. This includes the degree to whicha university rewards academic performance honestly andfairly, the degree to which its faculty and administrationopenly advertise and adhere to codes of conduct, and thedegree to which open discussion is cherished and differingopinions respected. The more a university exhibits thesecharacteristics the more likely will its students exhibithuman capital through their knowledge and skills and themore they will contribute to social capital, the kind thatgenerates willingness to sacrifice for a common good, aswell as tolerance and understanding of other views andopinions.Universities that exhibit a very high degree ofhuman and social capital are of higher quality, and it is high-quality universities that will have the most positiveimpact on a nation’s social cohesion. What this implies isthat universities where corruption occurs, where gradesand admission decisions and accreditation itself can bechanged through bribes, will threaten a nation’s socialcohesion.

Instead of modeling good behavior, a corruptuniversity would model the opposite, behavior that isdysfunctional to the nation’s future.Fighting higher education corruption is a globalproblem today, and the stakes are high. The Bolognaprocess, through which members of the European Unionare working to harmonize their higher education systemsto allow for increased mobility of students and staff, andthe new UNESCO accreditation guidelines hold outan opportunity for universities in different parts of theworld to be compared in terms of program quality.Thewillingness of a high-quality university to be compared toothers often seems to depend on whether a university candemonstrate that it is not corrupt.The burden of proof is on the university undergoingscrutiny. If it cannot prove its own honesty, its studentswill be at a permanent disadvantage in the labor market,and the public may well ask to what extent publicinvestment has been well spent.In sum, there is increasingly a successful “model”of higher education that applies in all regions of theworld, and that is the model in which higher educationinstitutions themselves are able to finance their ownobjectives. It is increasingly clear that higher education hasa unique role to play in a nation’s social cohesion, but itcan play either a negative role by modeling unprofessionalbehavior, or a positive role by living up to internationalstandards of conduct.