Hoy se ha dado a conocer el Informe The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance, de Agosto 2007, producido por Ryan Hahn para el Global Center on Private Financing of Higher Education.
El Informe aborda las principales tendencias del financiamiento de la educación superior en los países de la OECD y en países en vías de desarrolloo del Asia, América Latina y Europa Central y del Este.
Bajar en Informe aquí
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Abaliza las razones del incremento del financiamiento privado, el comportamiento del financiamiento público de las universidades, las diversas modalidades de canalizar recursos privados a las instituciones de educación superior y los motivos demográficos, económicos y de política pública que impulsan esta transformación.
A manera de introducción señala:
señala:
Currently, most governments around the world take primary responsibility for the financing of higher education. The numerous public benefits of higher education continue to justify substantial government support, despite competing priorities such as health care, primary and secondary education, and infrastructure. However, a combination of increased per unit costs and higher enrollments has driven up costs, straining government resources to their limit. Consequently, the private sector—represented by households, businesses, and philanthropists—has taken on even greater responsibility for the costs of higher education. This cost-sharing with the private sector takes a number of forms, including tuition1 paid by students and parents, fees and royalties earned through university-industry collaboration and donations from alumni and other philanthropists.2 The increasing reliance on private finance to cover the costs of higher education has stimulated a parallel trend. To manage this increased cost-sharing, private finance increasingly serves as a conduit for investment in higher education through bond issuances, securitizations, private and public-private student loan programs, and other means. Increased cost-sharing and greater private investment have helped reduce the strain on government resources and maximize the resources available to higher education.
Para un comentario sobre el Informe ver, más abajo, el artículo publicado hoy por The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Recursos asociados
Mexico – Higher Education Financing Project, 1 agosto 2007
Recientes publicaciones sobre finanaciamiento de la educación superior (OECD), 19 mayo 2007
Conferencia sobre crédito educativo, 21 marzo 2007
Mercados universitarios: Los nuevos escenarios de la educación superior, 12 marzo 2007. Libro de JJ. Brunner y D. Uribe (Texto disponible aquí. Impresión en prensa).

Worldwide, Financing for Higher Education Is Increasingly Shifting From Public to Private Sources
By BURTON BOLLAG
With college enrollments mushrooming in many nations but public support generally unable to keep up, the world is seeing a historic swing from public to private financing of higher education, according to a report scheduled for release today by the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
That shift has become evident in a number of ways. First and foremost, more students and their families are paying their own way as countries impose tuition. And institutions themselves are looking for private cash in new ways, collaborating with businesses and starting up fund-raising departments.
“There is a global shift in understanding that higher education has public and private benefits,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the institute, “and that there should be public and private participation” in paying for it.
The idea remains controversial. In many countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, higher education has traditionally been dominated by free public universities. Government attempts to introduce even modest tuition payments have been met with sometimes violent student protests.
The institute is a nonprofit group promoting access and quality in postsecondary education around the world.
Its report found wide differences among countries. But in the 53 countries for which the institute found compatible data, private financing had become an important junior partner to the public purse by 2002, accounting on average for 37 percent of all expenditures on higher education.
In eight middle-income countries for which figures were available, including Argentina, Chile, and Jamaica, money from private sources accounted for 43 percent of all spending on higher education. “In this group of countries,” the report says, “private finance came much closer to playing the role of an equal partner.”
In the richer countries, private financing generally played a smaller role. It accounted for 23 percent of all higher-education expenditures in 2003 among the wealthier nations in the study. But the percentage is growing, and those countries appear to be headed in the same direction as the rest of the world, the report says. (Even among rich countries, the percentage of private financing varies greatly, from over 50 percent in Australia, Japan, and the United States, to less that 10 percent in Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal.)
Other avenues of private support for higher education include the spread of private, for-profit institutions, and the issuance of bonds by colleges to raise money from investors.
Not enough information is available to map out the growth of this relatively new trend, the report notes. But for the countries for which data were available, which are mostly industrialized nations, private finance as a part of total expenditure increased on average by five percentage points from 1995 to 2003.
The countries that showed the greatest increases were Australia, Britain, and Italy. In the first two, that is largely explained by government decisions to introduce tuition at public universities in the late 1990s.
Only four countries showed a decrease in the role of private spending: the Czech Republic, Ireland, Norway, and Spain. Ireland introduced tuition but then abolished it in 1996. There and in Norway, high economic growth has allowed the government to pick up most of the bill even as college systems have expanded.
The shift toward private financing has been driven by rapidly growing enrollments in almost all countries in the world. This has been caused in part by expansion of public school systems, resulting in growing numbers of young people graduating from high school. The other factor is economic: the growth of a global, “knowledge” economy that increasingly requires employees with a college education.
Those trends are all clearly visible in three of the world’s largest countries. In China college enrollments more than doubled between 1998 and 2004. That expansion followed the introduction of tuition at Chinese institutions. By one estimate, from 1990 to 2001, the share of public financing in Chinese higher education dropped from 99 percent to 55 percent. India and Indonesia experienced similar developments. Together, those three Asian giants account for 41 percent of the world population.
One of the rare nations that has not allowed private financing in any form is Turkmenistan, which was ruled, until his recent death, by an idiosyncratic authoritarian leader.
While allowing various forms of private participation, two Latin American countries, Venezuela and Bolivia, have nonetheless also bucked the trend. Their populist governments, benefiting from Venezuela’s oil revenues, have reduced the role of private financing in higher education.
The trend toward greater private financing is a complex issue, said Mr. Merisotis. In most countries, it has been central to the overall expansion of enrollments. In the best of cases, he said, governments have used tuition from wealthier students to subsidize scholarship or loan programs for poorer ones.
Yet student-loan systems are relatively rare. In Latin America, Chile recently became one of the first countries to introduce a national student-loan system. In Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Ethiopia are among the countries trying to develop one.
Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education |