segunda-feira, janeiro 26, 2004
Who Pays to Study?
Este artigo da Economist analisa o estado das Universidades europeias (principalmente o caso inglês).
The price and quantity of courses are state-controlled, in a system more suited to Soviet central planning than to a modern democracy. And as with other planned economies, the result of government intervention is increasingly unsatisfactory. In Britain, over 30 years, universities have gone from being almost wholly autonomous, with state-financed block grants handed out at arm's length, to becoming branch offices of a government ministry.
Admissions, too, bring a whiff of the old Soviet system. The government is convinced that more working-class students, including many with few formal qualifications, should go to university. Its ultimate target is 50% of 18-30-year-olds by 2010, and it is getting there fast. Figures released this week show that the number of students in higher education has risen in just one year from 43% to nearly 45% of the relevant age cohort. In 1979, the percentage of school-leavers going on to higher education was just 12.4%.
(...)
The story of British higher education is less about expansion than inflation of qualifications. University degrees mean less and less and there are more and more of them. The rot set in in 1992, when the Conservative government allowed the polytechnics?locally based institutions that originally specialised in vocational teaching?to relabel themselves universities. That created a panoply of new academic courses, many of dubious merit, and kicked away a vital pillar of the higher education system, between the purely vocational further education colleges and the fully academic universities. This trend towards uniformity has disastrously weakened higher education in Britain.
(...)
In effect, universities in these countries [refere-se à Europa continental] have become government-owned degree mills. Their aim is to get the greatest number of young people in and out for the least money and trouble. Really determined students may fight their way through to gain a professor's attention, win a research scholarship and start doing some real work, probably in postgraduate study. The others will arrive in the labour market, qualification in hand, feeling that their mostly middle-class parents have something to show for their taxes.
(...)
No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education. And it keeps standards high, too. The European Commission recently published a painstaking ranking of the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10; from other EU countries, no university ranks higher than 40.
The American system is not flawless. The diversity which makes the system so dynamic also leaves it vulnerable to abuse. In the humanities, intellectual fashion seems bizarrely distant from the real world. Many bad ideas?notably political correctness?started life as American campus fads. And budget pressures squeeze the system when times are tough. This year, the axe has fallen hard on California's public universities.
Yet for all that, the numbers going into American higher education continue to rise, and the average tuition fee in an American university is around $4,500?some $1,000 less than the proposed maximum to be charged in England. Fees in the California state system, even after two steep recent rises compelled by leaner budgets, are less than $3,000, and a third of the income from them goes into grants for students who cannot afford even that.
(...)
No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education. And it keeps standards high, too. The European Commission recently published a painstaking ranking of the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10; from other EU countries, no university ranks higher than 40.
The American system is not flawless. The diversity which makes the system so dynamic also leaves it vulnerable to abuse. In the humanities, intellectual fashion seems bizarrely distant from the real world. Many bad ideas?notably political correctness?started life as American campus fads. And budget pressures squeeze the system when times are tough. This year, the axe has fallen hard on California's public universities.
Yet for all that, the numbers going into American higher education continue to rise, and the average tuition fee in an American university is around $4,500?some $1,000 less than the proposed maximum to be charged in England. Fees in the California state system, even after two steep recent rises compelled by leaner budgets, are less than $3,000, and a third of the income from them goes into grants for students who cannot afford even that.
posted by Miguel Noronha 12:13 da tarde
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