GLOBAL
At the UK universities conference in September 2022, there was a panel discussion made up of experts from Australia, Canada and the UK reflecting on the spiraling costs and funding of higher education and the importance of rethinking the mix between student fees and public subsidy.
There were also valuable suggestions on the reform of the payment regime for graduates who had taken out loans to finance their higher education.
A business model based on exploitation
During the discussion, it was recognized that the cost burden of higher education had fallen too heavily on the fee element of the financial equation, with most participants supporting the need to rethink the balance in favor of higher subsidy to universities. .
But I also suggested that further deliberation on international fees was required as part of this higher education funding review. After all, there was widespread recognition that the fees charged to international students were excessive.
In the case of a UK university, SOAS University of London, the actual cost of delivering a PhD degree was estimated to be around £4,600 (US$5,600) per year per student. SOAS fees for international students are around £20,000 (US$24,500), a surcharge of around 400%.
This excessive markup would not be tolerated in most private companies. So how can public universities have such fees when they claim a public good and social justice mandate?
The answer was interesting. Most of the audience avoided the question or justified the business model on the grounds that students were attracted to the brand of research from universities in the UK, US, Australia and Canada.
This is a common justification for the high fees charged to international students, but very little empirical evidence is provided to support the claim.
Are there large research universities in these countries? Absolutely! Is this the engine of international student mobility to these countries? Probably not. The main driver is the desire to access jobs in the global labor market through qualifications from these countries. The motivation that drives international student mobility is, indeed, inequality.
Consequences for our world
A vice-chancellor at the hearing argued that the costs of higher education were well above the public subsidy and fees charged to domestic students in the UK. He argued that excessive international fees were necessary for UK universities to survive financially.
It effectively expressed the implicit consensus of the majority at the conference: leave international rates as they are.
This is because the business model underlying higher education in the UK, US, Australia and Canada is double cross-subsidizing at its core.
First, research receives a significant cross-subsidy from the income generated by teaching and learning. Second, the costs of the teaching and learning enterprise itself are cross-subsidized by the astronomical fees charged to international students at Anglo-Saxon universities. Without this, most of these universities would not break even.
This business model is consolidating and expanding more and more due to government policy and the acquiescence of the university executive to this agenda. In the UK, at the behest of the Department of Trade and Industry, the recruitment of international students to universities has risen from 480,000 to just over 600,000.
A Higher Education Policy Institute report on this recruitment called it a stalwart asset, with some £28bn (US$34bn) in profits benefiting cities and communities across the country.
While this is a necessary corrective to the right-wing scaremongering of the anti-immigration lobby in the UK, isn’t it necessary to think about the consequences of this business model for our world?
This business model is negatively impacting human and institutional capacities in low-income countries by accelerating the brain drain that inevitably arises from the focus on recruiting young students from these places.
It is also jeopardizing the collective ability to address the transnational challenges of this historic moment, such as pandemics, climate change, migration, poverty, and political and social polarization.
These challenges require the deployment of both global science and technology and local knowledge. This requires a compromise between knowledge systems around the world, which is not possible through a global model of higher education essentially organized around the establishment of northern enclaves of teaching, learning and research.
These universities are effectively pursuing short-term financial strategies that could compromise the long-term collective future of the world community.
Embrace radical pragmatism
This recognition need not lead to a nationally chauvinistic, anti-immigrant, right-wing stance. Nor need it lead to the adoption of an unrealistic understanding of what is managerially possible in a constrained and adversarial political environment run by conservative governments.
The stance taken by university executives that managerial decisions are conditioned by the current political environment is essentially a loophole. It is true that there are limitations, but university managers also have relative autonomy to alleviate the worst excesses of this truly exploitative business model.
On the fee front, this would imply recognition that there are systemic political factors forcing universities to charge excessive international fees. But there must also be a commitment to do everything possible within our limitations to mitigate the consequences.
At the very least, this should mean including international fees as part of a broader discussion on university funding. This would allow university executives to think about the challenge.
Could there be a sliding fee scale for government-funded students versus those paid by families? Should students from different countries be subject to differential fees?
Since the governments of China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have generous scholarship plans for their students to study outside of those countries, would it be possible to charge higher fees to those students?
On the need to allow a compromise between knowledge systems, would it be possible to think of transnational educational associations between universities from the North and the South?
This would have to be done carefully and with attention to quality assurance mechanisms on both sides. But it could lead to co-developed, co-taught, and co-accredited academic programs that would mitigate the need for students to leave their home countries for college degrees that open up the global job market for them.
It would have the added benefit of providing graduates with knowledge and skills that are not only academically excellent, but also contextually relevant. Given the reduced labor costs resulting from sharing academic tasks, these programs could be sustained with lower fees.
Some of the suggestions advocated here may be partial solutions that require more work. And there may be other possibilities that have not been considered.
But what is urgently required is collective ownership of the problem of a costly and exploitative business model for higher education in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
Taking collective ownership will show that universities recognize the problem and are doing everything they can within the constraints they face. This is important for the legitimacy of the institutions and the university system as a whole.
University leaders cannot invoke social justice for domestic students and not for international students. Similarly, they cannot talk about the importance of addressing global challenges like pandemics and climate change while embracing business models that undermine the collective ability to deal with these crises.
University leaders need to challenge their selective morality and start implementing better business models that can be deployed more widely as political circumstances change.
Adam Habib is Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Email: [email protected]
This article was first published by International Higher Educationa publication of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) in the United States. News from the University World is a member of CIHE and the article is republished with permission. Read the original article here.
