Letter from London

Students as custom

It is an unsettling thought that with the advent of top-up fees next September, universities are already being encouraged to view their new fee-paying students as customers. Sir Howard Newby, chief executive of Higher Education Funding Council for England, recently advised university managements that “students are consumers in other spheres of their life, which universities are going to have to match. The idea that students should jolly well be grateful for what we do no longer works. We need to be responsive to students and not say we know what they ought to want.”

Now that students have joined the ranks of a customers like rail passengers and hospital patients who have gradually grown used to their new status, it is important that universities do know what students “ought to want”. Teaching staff experience indicates that students have no idea of what they want or expect. Having recently met the new intake of first year students, it’s quite obvious they welcome guidance and help of any type or description. This is why they have entered university” to find out.

At a recent conference on higher education in London it was suggested that university managements will have to be on their toes to manage their customers if they are to cope with changes which are in the works, including course top-up fees from next year, major changes in admission procedures a process which is now almost entirely electronic despite teething troubles. On top of these changes there is a strong likelihood that within the next ten years or so the number of 18-year-olds in the British population will begin to drop dramatically, which means that universities could be struggling to fill installed capacities.

Students top-up fees which will rise to a maximum of £3,000 (Rs.2.5 lakh) per year remains a hot topic, and the subject was recently raised again by the two contenders for Conservative party leadership, David Davis and David Cameron, who are divided over the introduction of the policy. Davis describes higher fees as “a straightforward tax on learning” and says he would never have had the opportunity to go to university in his day as it would have incurred “such huge debt”.

On the other hand, Cameron (who has since won the Tory leadership race) believes tuition fees are essential to help fund Britain’s universities so they remain “world class”. “To make our economy competitive, we need to be prepared to remove burdens on the state, and that’s why I’ve made clear that in higher education some form of co-payment is almost certainly the correct way forward,” he says.

Both viewpoints come down to money, and whichever way one looks at it, the plain truth is that higher education is extremely expensive. The interests of equity demand it should be a cost shared between the beneficiary, educational institutions, business and the taxpayer, since all these parties and individuals benefit in the long run as the country moves forward into the future.

(Jacqueline Thomas is a London-based academic)

United States

Education isolationism fallout fears

A recent report shows that US students’ knowledge of other nations is “weak and increasingly dangerous” and urges more international educational and foreign-language requirements in lower grades and in higher education. The study, States Prepare for the Global Age, says US students “lack sufficient knowledge about other world regions, languages, and cultures and are in danger of being educationally and economically handicapped in an increasingly interconnected global economy”.

This is despite a record high in the number of US students studying abroad, up almost 10 percent over the past year, according to a report from the Institute of International Education (IIE).

Just short of 200,000 Amercians study abroad, up about 20 percent over the past five years. The rise reflects US universities’ growing awareness that “increasing the global competence among the next generation is a national priority and an academic responsibility,” says Allan E. Goodman, the institute’s president.

Yet schools and universities are doing little to meet the resulting demand for Asian language speakers, particularly Chinese, according to the IIE report, which precedes a national conference in Washington to tackle the gap between the growing importance of the world in general and Asia in particular, and students’ limited knowledge of the issue. Organisers are to propose that 5 percent of all US students learn Chinese which is currently studied by fewer than 40,000. The conference will involve policy makers, business leaders and educators.

Britain

Fee fixing charge against top schools

Fifty leading private schools were found guilty last November of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, which investigators said allowed them to drive up fees for thousands of parents. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) published provisional findings showing that the schools, which include Eton and Harrow, exchanged detailed financial information in a regular report known as the Sevenoaks Survey. “This… systematic exchange of confidential information as to intended fee increases is anti-competitive and resulted in parents being charged higher fees than would otherwise be the case,” says OFT’s report.

The inquiry has focused fresh attention on the benefits private schools derive from their charitable status — a controversial tax exemption that critics say effectively amounts to a government subsidy — in return for questionable wider “public benefit”. The Charities Commission says it will be looking closely at the implications of the ruling for private schools and charities in general.

The Independent Schools Council (ISC), an umbrella group that represents 60 percent of private schools, has rejected the OFT findings and says there is no evidence to support the claim that sharing of information had led to a rise in fees. “Fees in the independent sector rise in line with costs in the (public) sector, for the reason that most of the costs are staff salaries and pensions,” says Jonathan Shephard, director general of ISC, adding that the two-and-a-half-year inquiry, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds is a “scandalous waste of money”.

Earlier this year research by the Halifax building society showed that school fees had risen by more than three times the rate of inflation in the past 20 years. The schools have until March to appeal, when OFT will make its final ruling and decide what fines, if any, to impose. It can fine each school up to 10 percent of its annual turnover, but an OFT statement says financial penalties are likely to be limited. The ISC says any fine would mean that some schools would be forced to raise fees further.

The OFT investigation focused on fee rises between 2001 and 2004 and found that in each year schools swapped details of their intended fees. Sevenoaks school in Kent then “collated that information and circulated it, in the form of tables, to the schools concerned. The information in the tables was updated and circulated between four and six times each year”.

The investigation was reportedly started by a student who hacked into his school’s financial records and leaked the documents to the press. Bursars freely admit that they used to meet regularly and talk about fees, but maintain that such swapping of information did not amount to a concerted plot to push up fees.

Russia

School leaving exam compromise

Russian universities will keep their own system of entrance exams when the country introduces its long-delayed unified state exam, a nationwide scheme similar to ‘A’ levels. Years of lobbying by rectors of top universities to halt a common school-leaving / university entrance exam seems to have paid off after the education ministry announced a much modified new parliamentary Bill last October.

Measures allowing universities to have flexible entrance requirements replaced earlier plans to scrap college tests in favour of the new exam which Viktor Sadovichny of Moscow State University calls “tick-box testing”. A Bill to introduce the exam across Russia by 2008 was agreed after a series of meetings between Andrei Fursenko, the education minister and groups that included members of the Russian Union of Rectors, education officials and pedagogical experts.

The Bill — which is likely to become law within two years — will allow universities to accept students based on an assessment of their unified state exam results, scores in regional and national subject ‘olympiads’ (public competitions that test the knowledge of Russia’s top students) and their own entrance exams.

“We cannot call this a complete victory because they are not leaving university entrance exams entirely alone,” says Evgenia Zaitseva, a spokesperson for Prof. Sadovichny, “but this is what the rector has been fighting for.”

Alexander Kachanov, a spokesman for the education ministry says the unified state exam will be rolled out nationwide by 2008. Universities will have to accept the results of the new exam but could demand supplementary tests if a student fell short of an institution’s benchmark.

Italy

Follina’s rainbow classrooms

Rachad arrived from morocco two years ago. He supports Milan (“of course”) and wants to be an electrician, like his father. Manpreet is a Punjabi Sikh, who followed her lorry-driver father here five years ago. Her ambition is rather different — she wants to become president of India. Adama, from Senegal, is the shyest. At 11, he is the youngest in the group, and he has got a baby sister at home to think about. He likes looking after her, he says.

The three are all pupils at the Istituto Comprensivo Fogazzaro in Follina, a combined primary and middle school in north-east Italy. It is one of the most multi-ethnic schools in the country (“if not themost” says headteacher Gianni Busolini). More than a quarter of its pupils are foreign and they come from 23 countries.

There are now 420,000 immigrants in Italian schools, a 20 percent rise since last year. The number may still be small — 4 percent of the total school population — compared with other countries in Europe, but it is growing rapidly, bringing new problems and challenges for teachers.

But there are two striking differences from immigration patterns in countries like Britain and France, historically linked to specific countries by a colonial past. The first is the range of countries of origin: Albania, the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Romania, North Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, China and South America. The second is the kind of place families end up in, like Follina.

Big towns such as Rome, Milan and Genoa have their fair share of third world immigrants. But work is often easier to find in semi-rural areas, where a sudden growth in light industry and family-run businesses provided the driving force behind the economic boom of the 1970s. Follina, a pretty village of 3,000 inhabitants in the foothills of the Dolomites, is known for its 14th-century abbey, and a history in the wool trade. Today there are furniture factories and a textile industry (this is Benetton country) where there still are jobs for people moving in. Housing is relatively easy to find.

When it comes to community relations, the school is in the frontline. “On the whole, we’ve only had small problems,” says Busolini. “I can count the number of local parents who have withdrawn children to send them to private schools on one hand.”

Language is the main problem, since success at school depends on knowing Italian. “This is a sore point,” says Busolini, “since up to a quarter of foreign children have to repeat the year, often because of language problems, whereas the percentage is much smaller for Italian children.”

But he insists that inclusion into mainstream education is right. “I’m a great believer in the constitution, which says that everyone is equal and has equal dignity,” he says.

Uganda

Hard times in African Harvard

Their central dormitory is named after a charismatic Congolese leader who was assassinated in 1961. Their university has educated generations of prominent Africans, including the current presidents of Kenya and Tanzania. But conditions today at Makerere University, once known as the Harvard of Africa, are an embarrassment. Classes are crowded, dorms have only intermittent running water, scholarship funds are depleted and there are long waits for online computers.

“It’s pathetic,” says David Mukibi, a law student who lives in Patrice Lumumba Hall, which was built to house 3,500 students but now holds twice that number. “Our dorm is stinking. There are students sharing beds, bathrooms flooding. It’s so congested here. But what other choice do we have?”

As Africa grows increasingly urbanised, more young people are leaving rural life, finishing high school and flocking to universities. But they often find overcrowded, financially struggling colleges where professors strike over wages and students riot over cancelled scholarships.

Sometimes campus frustrations result in serious violence. In Kenya hundreds of students recently blocked streets near the University of Nairobi and threw stones at passing cars after the power was cut during exams. And business students at Makerere went on strike, wielding branches and accosting their principal, Wasswa Balunywa, to protest against fees for healthcare and computers.

Some relief arrived last October when the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and six US foundations pledged $200 million (Rs.900 crore) over the next five years to strengthen higher education in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania. Of this about $5 million (Rs.22.5 crore) will be used to pay for internet connections using a high-speed global satellite. Both students and professors say they wish more funds would be used to prepare the next generation of Africans for public service and private enterprise. “The message many young Africans want to give the West is: Please stop building us bore-holes and roads,” says Andrew Mwenda, a political analyst in Uganda. “Funding our schools is the best thing that can be done for Africa.”

According to the administration, enrollment at Makerere has soared from 5,042 in 1984 to more than 40,000. Some of its programmes are still seen as the best in Africa, such as the Master’s degree in public health to combat Aids. That programme has been supported since 2000 by the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. But many other departments, such as computer science and the business school, need to be modernised and expanded.

Africa

Medium of instruction debate revival

What became clear as the 7th Language and Development Conference held in Addis Ababa last October moved from being a “conference” to a forum for argument and critical analysis, was that a debate on the links between language and development is well overdue. A better understanding of the impact of language as a medium of instruction on development is a high priority for government, policy makers, communities, teachers and many others.

The concern raised by education consultant John Clegg, that language policies which promote the use of a non-mother-tongue or a second language (often English) as the medium of instruction could be working against education attainment in Africa, came as a surprise to some. The argument that policies promoting second-language-medium education could be constraining learning is a challenge to parents and policy makers who believe that children who start learning in the global language of English as early as possible, are inevitably advantaged nationally and globally over those who stay longer with their mother tongue.

Clegg’s question about whether African learners get a fair deal in schools where English-medium policies operate, and evidence that language policies driven often by the best intentions may be having a very different effect, caused quite a stir. He also argued that learners who do not have good foundations in their mother tongue are disadvantaged if taught in a second language and this situation is compounded when teachers using the second language themselves lack confidence in that language.

One sensible way forward, as Clegg advocates, is to establish African pilots of bilingual education to explore the available forms, their affordability and their acceptability to parents and planners.

The use of language as a tool for national development in Africa drew on work presented by Prof. Herman Batibo, a Tanzanian linguist. He argued that false starts made in adopting majority languages or global languages in some countries have meant that the rich African resource of languages has been allowed to languish. He advocated an approach to national language policy that recognises the cultural and economic value of many languages and policies, setting specific national roles for global languages, national languages and regional and community languages.

Comments Prof. Ayo Bamgbose of Nigeria, one of the leading thinkers on language and development: “For meaningful development to take place emphasis needs to be placed on education and mass participation in economic processes. If the majority of the population is to be reached, the country’s indigenous languages need to be used for learning and teaching and in many other domains. While a global language such as English is a useful tool for development, community development programmes cannot be successfully implemented unless they are presented in a language that people understand well.”

(Compiled from The Guardian, Times Educational Supplement and The Times Higher Education Supplement)