Students in the developing world are likely to have to pay more towards their degrees as demand for higher education mushrooms globally in coming decades, according to the World Bank.
Yet-to-be-published research conducted by the financial institution indicates that demand for tertiary education around the world is going to double in the next two decades and that – significantly – by 2040, 82 per cent of university students will be in developing countries.
This would represent nearly 200 million additional tertiary students in the developing world and a significant shift in the gravity of global higher education away from high-income countries.
But Roberta Malee Bassett, the World Bank’s global lead for tertiary education, said that while demand for high-level skills from students and employers was “extreme”, the available funding was “going in the other direction”.
Speaking at 51吃瓜’s 51吃瓜 Sustainable Development Congress in Istanbul, she said that this level of increased demand was likely to lead to a funding deficit of around $1 trillion (?742 million).
With a funding gap on this scale, it was inevitable that student contributions would have to increase, Bassett warned.
“Can we mobilise private funding – can we put more on the private sector to be a partner in funding the skills they need for their jobs? [And] what is the relationship between government funding individual private funding and the market around funding higher education?” asked Bassett.
“Lending student loans is a very difficult and challenging issue for lots of reasons but is an inevitability that that is also going to become part of this equation.”
Bassett said that the bank’s research indicated strong grounds for investing in higher education, with the wage premium for graduates over other workers standing at 15.7 per cent in low- and middle-income countries, compared to 5.3 per cent for employees with secondary education.
Significantly, the research found that that the “extraordinarily high” graduate wage premium in developing countries had not declined during the expansion of higher education over the past 15 years, indicating that the need for advanced skills was keeping pace with the growth in enrolment rates.
“This is a really clear sign that we have not met the ‘parity moment’,” Bassett said.
Bassett acknowledged that, in spite of findings such as these, many higher education sectors around the world faced tough questions about the value of their qualifications, and put this down to the fact that universities “don’t advocate for themselves”.
She urged sectors to conduct graduate outcome tracking surveys, such as those conducted in the UK and the US, to better evidence the case for investment in higher education.
“We are seeing real results on the ground when we do measure,” Bassett said. “It’s the unknown that creates this vacuum of information and anecdotes, and that’s very damaging and dangerous if the swirl or narrative is that it’s not worth it. So we have to fill that gap with information.”
Bassett argued that there would be significant benefits to expanding higher education, highlighting that the gross higher education enrolment rate across Africa as a whole stood at just 9 per cent. With the rate running much higher in nations such as Mauritius and South Africa, this meant that it was well below 9 per cent in other sectors, such as Tanzania and Mozambique.
“Right now in an ideal world it would be obvious that the investment in tertiary education pay off [and so countries would] put more money into tertiary education,” added Bassett.
“What we really hope is that [these demands] don’t cannibalise other sectors of education; there has to be another way, working holistically around the entire budget of a nation, really thinking about where the investments are going and what the returns are.
“But I think it’s an inevitable outcome that private individuals or families or private sector employers will become more and more important to financing.”
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