Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education, Stanford University.
Prashant Loyalka is Center Fellow, Freeman-Spogli Institute, Stanford University.
Maria Dobryakova is Research Fellow, National Research University-Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
Rafiq Dossani is Senior Economist, Rand Corporation.
Isak Froumin is Academic Director, Institute for Educational Studies, National Research University―Higher School of Economics.
Katherine Kuhns is an Independent Consultant at WestEd and Gallop Ventures and a former Lecturer at Stanford University.
Jandhyala B. G. Tilak is Professor and Chair of Educational Finance, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, India.
Rong Wang is Director, China Institute for Education Finance Research, Peking University.

UNIVERSITY EXPANSION IN A CHANGING GLOBAL ECONOMY

Triumph of the BRICs?

By Martin Carnoy, Prashant Loyalka, Maria Dobryakova, Rafiq Dossani, Isak Froumin, Katherine Kuhns, Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, Rong Wang

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8601-0

Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………viiList of Tables…………………………………………………….xiPreface and Acknowledgments…………………………………………xv1 The State and Higher Educational Change…………………………….12 The Great Higher Education Expansion……………………………….343 Economic Returns to Investing in Higher Education and Their Impact in
the BRIC Countries…………………………………………………724 The Changing Financing of BRIC Higher Education……………………..1045 BRIC Universities as Institutions in the Process of Change……………1406 Who Are the Students, and How Are They Shaped by BRIC Higher Education?..1797 The Quality of BRIC Higher Education……………………………….2128 BRIC Higher Education and Social Equity…………………………….2579 What Do BRIC Higher Education Strategies Imply for the Future?………..295Notes…………………………………………………………….327References………………………………………………………..347About the Authors………………………………………………….365Index…………………………………………………………….369

CHAPTER 1

The State and Higher Educational Change

This is a study of higher education expansion andquality in the world’s four largest developing economies—Brazil,Russia, India, and China—known as the BRIC countries. These four economiesare already important players globally, but by mid-century, they arelikely to be economic powerhouses (O’Neill, 2001). Whether they reach thatlevel of development will depend partly on how successfully they create qualityhigher education that puts their labor forces at the cutting edge of theinformation society. It is difficult to imagine large economies reaching advancedstages of development in the twenty-first century without high levelsof innovative, well-trained, socially oriented professionals.

How effectively the BRICs improve and expand universities also affectsthe developed countries. This is especially true of university education intechnology fields of study, such as various types of electronic/communicationsengineering and computer science. Skilled engineers and scientists areessential to high-technology industries, and these industries are, in turn, importantto economic development in the information age. If the BRICs cantrain large numbers of highly qualified engineers and scientists, the poles oftechnological innovation could shift away from the United States, Europe,and Japan or—at the least—become increasingly shared between these oldcenters and the new (Freeman, 2010).

For this reason, we place special focus in this study on the increase inenrollment of engineers and computer scientists. Further, the perceived andactual growth in demand for graduates with technical/professional skills hasbeen an important force in at least three of the BRICs in shaping the nature ofthe higher education expansion, and in several of the BRICs a new emphasison university research and development in technical fields has been a dominanttheme of the past decade.

Evaluating the potential success of the BRIC countries in developinghighly skilled technical professionals is not the only reason to study theirhigher education systems. We want to learn how these governments go aboutorganizing higher education because this can tell us a lot about their impliciteconomic, social, and political goals, and their capacity to reach them. Althoughthe BRICs are acutely aware of their new role in the global economy,their governments must negotiate complex political demands at home, includingensuring domestic economic growth, social mobility, and politicalparticipation. Because more and better higher education is perceived by thepublic to be positively associated with all these elements of a developed society,BRIC governments’ focus on their university systems has become animportant part of their domestic economic and social policy.

Thus, the state—that is, the political system and the way it is reflected ingovernment organization and policies—is key to our analysis of higher educationdevelopment in the BRICs. Many studies of higher education focus onthe development of individual institutions or particular groups of institutions(for example, Clark, 1983; Altbach, 1998; Kirp, 2004). Others stress the importantrole played by economic market forces in higher education expansion(for example, World Bank, 2000). Still others argue that global institutionalenvironments are the most important cause of what happens to higher educationat the local and national level (Meyer et al., 2005). There is much to besaid for each of these theories of change. Yet, although all recognize that thenational state is a player in the change process, all downplay its powerful rolein shaping the national higher educational system in response to institutionalinertia, international institutional environments, and global and nationaleconomic contexts.

In this study we take a different approach. We ask how each national stateactively develops its higher education system, including achieving mass expansionand aiming for greater “quality,” in the context of the many forces,global and local, that impinge on its society. Further, we ask why each nationalstate takes the particular approach it does to higher educational expansionand improvement.

Our focus on how national states develop their higher educational systemsmeans that we necessarily situate our discussion of university expansion andquality in the context of governments’ educational policies. These, in turn,reflect much broader struggles over social goals and the distribution of nationalresources. While there is widespread recognition of the importance ofan efficient state to promote economic development (see, for example, WorldBank, 2004), there is a distinct paucity of research on how states in developingcountries try to reorganize access to and the delivery of university educationto create new knowledge. Little is known about how effectively countries aredeveloping the scientific and managerial cadres that will lead the economyinto science-based development. Further, much of what happens in highereducation today is heavily influenced by what happened in an earlier period.For the countries we are interested in, the political system (the state) in earlierperiods had rather different political and social goals than today’s state. However,the way the state functioned and higher education was developed in thepast carry over into the present and profoundly affect the shape and possibilitiesfor making change (Meyer et al., 2005; Altbach, 1998).

Given the constraints imposed by historical conditions, it is not surprisingthat state higher education strategies in the BRICs for both expansion andimprovement vary. Indeed, one important piece of evidence supporting ourstate-centered analysis is the great variation we observe among countries inthe mechanisms that the state uses to shape higher education. If market forcesdominated the shape of higher education, we would tend to find much greatersimilarities. Similarly, if global institutional environments dominated nationalstrategies, we would also observe much greater convergence.

The variety of approaches suggests that national political environments—includingeach society’s previous sets of state political-financial strategies thatformed the current system—heavily influence current approaches to financinghigher education.

Various levels of bureaucratic expertise (or the lack of it) and the inertiaof the state’s institutions—inertia that takes different forms in differentcountries—also play an important role in the politics of expanding and financinghigher education.

Nevertheless, given the current globalized environment, it is not surprisingthat there are a number of commonalities in the strategies that BRIC stateshave used to respond to the demands of changing economies and expandingenrollment in the past two decades. For example, all four states have, for betteror worse, turned increasingly to making students and their families sharein the costs of expanding higher education, either through tuition in publicinstitutions or promoting the expansion of full-tuition private universitiesand colleges. Some of the BRICs are also putting increasing resources into afew elite institutions, while “mass” institutions absorb most new students atrelatively low cost to the institutions but relatively high cost to the students.

We make the case that the effectiveness of such strategies and others to helpthe university system “overcome” inherited trends and to “re-create” highereducation in the current historical context is a good indicator of whetherBRICs will become economic powerhouses by the mid-twenty-first century.

Besides its focus on the state, our study is unusual for two other reasons.First, it is empirical. Analyses of higher educational systems are typically descriptiveand, if empirical, concentrate on particular aspects of the system,such as financial aid, the degree of equity, or the relationship between studentoutcomes (graduation rates, posteducational economic performance) and inputs(such as student characteristics, student family background, and highereducation institutional characteristics). We take a more comprehensive viewof the system and therefore have gathered data or use existing data on students,institutions, and socioeconomic-political contexts (including highereducation finance and payoffs to educated labor) to develop a broad pictureof the higher education system in each country at this particular moment intime. We also situate that picture in a historical pattern of change.

Second, the study is comparative. By measuring similar variables in eachcountry, we draw insights into how differing socioeconomic, historical patternsof change, and especially political contexts, are related to national andsubnational differences in how higher education develops. Using a comparativeapproach allows us to draw generalizations about shared patterns of change inthese large countries’ systems and why such shared patterns may exist.

We find that all of the BRIC states have greatly increased the numbers ofuniversity graduates in their labor forces, as well as the number of technicalgraduates and even the number of well-trained technical graduates. But theyare not equally effective in their strategies to improve the overall quality oftheir higher education systems. Nor are they equally effective in providingaccess to higher education for disadvantaged students and distributing governmentfunds fairly to different social class groups in their societies. Despitethis, we find that students in their final year of university in the BRICsappear to be generally satisfied with their engineering and computer scienceeducation even when they have attended second-tier, often not high-quality,institutions. This is the case even for the high fraction who have paid tuitionto attend those institutions. Although we focused on engineering and sciencestudents, we believe that student satisfaction extends to those studyingin many other fields. Thus, some BRIC states may be doing only a fair job ofbuilding high-quality university systems that are broadly accessible and fairlyfinanced across social groups, but they all seem to be achieving sufficientshort-term political legitimacy through the satisfaction of those who do getaccess. Whether this is enough to build the innovative super-economies thatBrazil, Russia, India, and China hope to be is a question we will try to answerin the pages that follow.

Background of the Study

Is There a Higher Education “Revolution” in BRIC Countries?

There has been a spate of new writing on the “revolution” in higher educationglobally (most prominently, Altbach et al., 2009; World Bank, 2000).This literature focuses on a number of important issues. The first of these isthat there has been an enormous expansion of higher education worldwidein the past thirty years, and much of this expansion has been in the developingcountries. Many reasons are cited for the rapid growth of enrollmentin higher education. Population growth and the rapid expansion of primaryand secondary schooling have in and of themselves increased demand forhigher education places. Yet there is also a sense around the world that morehigher education graduates are needed in economies that want to shift fromtraditional manufacturing to high-tech production and more human-capital-intensiveservices.

The objective signal that this may be so is the increasing private returnto those who complete their university degrees (Murphy and Welch, 1989,1995; Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, 2004). The dominant thinking, even inthe 1990s, was that the highest yield investment in education was in primaryschooling (Psacharopoulos, 1985; World Bank, 2000). Whether that assessmentwas correct or not (see Bennell, 1996, for a strong critique of Psacharopoulos’smethodology and empirical results), it is now apparent that as primaryand secondary education became universalized in more highly industrializedand postindustrial countries, the payoff of higher education rose in absoluteterms, especially compared to the rate of return to investment in lower levelsof schooling (for the reasons why this may have occurred, see Carnoy, 1972,1995). Higher returns from university education have increased the demandfor places in universities and in other postsecondary education institutions.

The second issue the literature emphasizes is the fundamental change inthe traditional view of higher education as a public good, entirely subsidizedby government funding. Altbach and colleagues (2009), along with others,claim that in contrast to this earlier view, governments today are more likelyto consider higher education a private good, whose benefits accrue mainly tothose who receive it. This implies that much of its cost should be borne bystudents and their families, not the broader taxpaying public.

The third “revolution” in higher education touted in the literature is theinternationalization and globalization of university systems. Millions of studentsnow study outside their own country and often stay in their host economyto work after completing their studies. English has become the dominantlanguage of higher education, particularly in sciences and other technicalfields. The U.S. research university has become the model for the notion ofthe “world-class” university. Research—both published and unpublished—becomesrapidly available through the Internet, and researchers worldwidecommunicate in real time through e-mail, blogging, and texting. Universitycurricula are available through open courseware, so university instructorsanywhere in the world can employ the latest ideas in how to teach courses.Further, a number of universities in the developed countries are openingbranches in developing countries, essentially using developed country”brands” and often faculty to attract paying students in the developing countries.Finally, the European Union has initiated the Bologna process, whichattempts to make the Union’s university systems more uniform. The purposeof that form of “internationalization” is to make it easier for students tostudy outside their own country’s postsecondary institutions and still obtaina common degree. The Bologna process illustrates the concept of the universalcredential, in which students can study in different countries, obtaining acredential recognized in all participating economies (Clotfelter, 2010).

The fourth “revolutionary” trend claimed for the new higher education isthe increasing use of information technology in reaching a broader clientele.This clientele is mainly working adults who want to hold jobs and study atthe same time, but it also includes a new generation of young people moreamenable to online, flextime learning. The potential of the Open Universityor correspondence school has been around a long time (Nelson Mandela gothis degrees through UNISA, South Africa’s correspondence university, andthe University of London’s external program), but with the advent of the Internet,the possibilities of watching streaming video lectures and engagingin intensive interaction with tutors and peers through e-mails and site blogshave opened up a whole new range of distance teaching methods. Professorsin some elite U.S. universities are beginning to offer mass open access to fullparticipation in their courses through the Internet. A recent report from theU.S. Department of Education (Institute of Educational Sciences, 2009) suggeststhat students learn the course material as well in virtual higher educationcourses as in traditional universities. Despite this promise, and despitethe great expansion of distance education, no virtual university nor a virtualcourse has attained the status of a first-rank institution, even though some,such as the Open University of Catalonia, also stress research (Carnoy, 2005),and it is possible that in the future, first-rank institutions will give coursecredit in some form to those students who successfully complete the institution’smass open courses on line.

There is little doubt that all four of these major trends in higher educationexist and that they are important. As we show in this study, however, they maymisrepresent themselves as true breaks with the past and, aside from the rapidexpansion of enrollment, may not be the most important trends to focus on,at least in terms of defining how the large developing countries are moving toreform their university systems in the new global environment.

In our view, a key change taking place in higher education in the BRICcountries (and in many other countries) is the increasing differentiation betweenthe “mass” universities and colleges, which absorb the vast majority ofstudents in the BRIC countries, and the “elite” universities, which, particularlyin China and Russia, are being pushed to become “world-class” research-typeuniversities and serve a relatively limited group of students. Althoughin all four countries, there is concern in the state bureaucracy about qualityin the mass universities, and even signs in some, such as China, of trying toreverse differentiation, the academic distance between the two types of highereducation institutions is growing, not only in terms of the amount of publicand private resources per student, but possibly in the quality of the courses,the expectations of students, and the labor market opportunities for studentsgraduating from the increasingly differentiated institutions.

This is not just an artifact of the process of expanding enrollment inhigher education. Nor is it just the result of the “natural differentiation”among tertiary-level (and, usually, also among secondary-level) institutionsthat characterizes most countries’ educational systems (OECD, 2008).We argue that this new trend is the result of government policies in BRICcountries of trying to strengthen research and the training of elite cadres in alimited group of institutions while satisfying broader goals of absorbing demandfor higher education at a much lower cost. These policies may changein the future, no doubt. However, at this historical juncture they represent thevarious BRIC countries’ approaches to growing and changing their highereducation systems.
(Continues…)Excerpted from UNIVERSITY EXPANSION IN A CHANGING GLOBAL ECONOMY by Martin Carnoy, Prashant Loyalka, Maria Dobryakova, Rafiq Dossani, Isak Froumin, Katherine Kuhns, Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, Rong Wang. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.