Private universities - A necessity

Lionel Wijesiri

Higher Education Minister confirmed recently that the Government has taken a firm decision to grant an opportunity to internationally acclaimed universities to set up branches here. Allaying fears expressed by some groups that the establishment of foreign universities in Sri Lanka could have an adverse impact on the graduates who pass out from local universities, the Minister guaranteed that there would be no such effect.

The concept of private higher education is nothing new. It started over four decades ago with the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This political breakdown has brought about many profound changes on the world scene. One remarkable development is the emergence of institutions of higher studies in the private sector. Before long, this “privatization” of higher education became a worldwide development especially in the western countries.

Increasingly, in the last two decades, the mindset of policy-makers in Asia has changed to a greater openness in giving the private sector and free markets a chance to prove their efficacy. In most Asian countries, private institutions have become an important element of the higher education systems. These countries found out that the private institutions can respond efficiently and effectively to changing demand, and they increase educational opportunities with little or no educational cost. The chief manifestation of the change has been the advance of privatization in countries as different as Singapore and India.

This is not to say that the old fears and suspicions have completely abated regarding the role of the free markets in worsening inequities among people, and the unequal distribution of resources to benefit the wealthy. But there is an increasing willingness to give free markets a second chance.

Social equality

In the 1950s and 1960s, the conventional wisdom among policymakers with respect to education was that it was a tool to create greater social and economic equality. The university and higher education were considered “the great equalizers” because, with access depending on only upon merit, the poor had an available means for social and economic advancement. However, in the 1970s and 80s this notion changed. The prevailing notion was that the beneficiaries of university education should shoulder a greater proportion of the burden.

In the 1990s, there has been a further shift in the consensus. It was agreed that free access to higher education may worsen the social and income-earning inequities. Evidence showed that upper income groups have received a greater share of the benefits of education. Subsidizing university education would in fact worsen the income inequities. Therefore, the burden should be borne directly by the beneficiary and not the taxpayer. Increasingly, societies began to regard higher education as more of a “private good” with not enough immediate and positive externalities to justify public support.

Since 1990s, new universities in the private sector have emerged in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, Cyprus, and Bolivia, and are in the planning stages in Africa and other parts of the globe. Is there a common theme within this trend? Based on the timing of these developments, one can argue that even if these are disconnected events without a coherent plan or a well-defined agenda, they all are an outgrowth of the social, economic and political milieu of our times.

There was one major reason for the shift. The pendulum of opinion among people and governments worldwide has swung markedly away from the expectation that the state apparatus will deliver goods and services. Rather, it has shifted to a new faith in the efficacy of free market mechanisms to allocate resources most efficiently. Globally, in the closing decades of the 20th century, the social and intellectual climate worldwide has changed dramatically in favour of the private economy.

Although many public sector companies have been privatized in both the North and the South following these political developments, no public university has yet been “privatized.”

Privatization in higher education has taken a different route. In some countries such as Bangladesh, the trend towards the privatization of education started at the bottom end, with primary and then secondary education. Currently, however, it is higher education that has increasingly become an arena for private and social entrepreneurship.

Isolation

Many eminent scholars who have studied the issue and participated in efforts to start new private universities have pointed out that an important contributing factor has been the general dissatisfaction with the pedagogical methods prevailing in the public universities, and a desire to use modern teaching techniques. The teaching methods remained basically in rote learning which seldom encouraged critical or creative thought by students or instructors.

The experience in Sri Lanka is consistent with this view. In the public universities, not only is there little or no emphasis on modern teaching, but also the tenure system virtually guarantees life-long employment. The cost of poor pedagogy based on rote memorization became clear to many when these bright students went overseas for graduate studies, or found employment in the real world where problem-solving skills are of paramount importance.

It is now a universally accepted fact that of all the factors of production, the most important is human capital. Traditionally, the policy-makers in Sri Lanka have ignored this fact. For a developing nation trying to break out of the trap of poverty and underdevelopment in the shortest possible time, perhaps the most critical investment would be training and educating the workforce. This concept recently has it gained a large following in our country, where formulas for success and shortcuts to economic growth and development are increasingly important.

Increased demand

Following the success of the Asian tiger economies of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, the new generation of leadership in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia attempted to accelerate development by investing heavily in education, especially higher education and technical training. The success of these efforts has not gone unnoticed in other Third World nations.

The private sector in Asian countries is now demanding access to higher education, an area previously monopolized by the public sector. In the new global economy, the growth of the information superhighway and the revolution in computing and communications have created a huge demand for the so-called “knowledge workers.” The perception is that private universities are in a much better position to react quickly to changes in the market like those that precipitated the recent financial crises, and to adapt their curriculum and programs to meet the needs of the labour markets.

To be continued