Standort: fm4.ORF.at / Meldung: "More Inclusive Universities "

Chris Cummins

Letters from a shrinking globe: around the day in 80 worlds.

19. 10. 2012 - 17:00

More Inclusive Universities

As the tuition fees debate rages on in Austria, a Saturday Reality Check Special on making higher education more diverse and meaningful worldwide.

Listen to the programme after the show via Podcast.

“You can’t have free access to universities and not charge any tuition fees,” says former Vienna University rector Georg Winkler. With no political appetite for a huge increase in public spending on higher education, he says, students should expect either access to be regulated or tuition fees to be widely introduced. He accuses those who deny these constraints of being “overly ideological and not pragmatic enough” adding that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Winkler says that the situation in Austria has been allowed to slide because of political dithering and point scoring within the ruling coalition. He accuses the Social Democrats of sticking to “old dogmas and myths” and the ÖVP of electioneering on the subject. “We have 7,000 German students at Vienna University; we have become one of the most important German universities. We want to attract good students but we don’t want people to come just because they weren’t accepted elsewhere.”

Warteschlange vor der Inskriptionsstelle der Uni Wien

APA/Herbert Neubauer

“Education is more than a luxury;” wrote the late British politician Robin Cook, “it is a responsibility that society owes to itself.” But how are we to make higher education more effective and more inclusive? And who should pay for it?

These are the questions I am trying to answer in the week’s Saturday Reality Check special, “Inclusive Higher Education”, at the end of a week-long focus on the future of universities here in Austria, elsewhere in Europe and also worldwide. I met the international experts who gathered at the recent Salzburg Global Seminar to discuss these questions and to get a wider perspective on the value of higher education that might help us understand the situation in this country.

We visit, for example, a talent-spotting initiative to find talent to fill the universities among rural, poor, black South Africans. For generations, these communities were conditioned through the brutality of Apartheid to stop believing in themselves. “Apartheid demoralised us,” says the project`s leader, Zena Richards from the University of Witwatersrand “When you start a programme that tells people they mean something and that they can contribute to society, that really means something.” She says the hunger for knowledge and the talent for elite learning that she discovered in the poor villages was “humbling.” She sees the drive to broaden the university talent pool as a vital part of nation-building.

We also hear from Jamil Salmi of the World Bank's Education Network on why only 1% of Europe`s Roma go to university and why this leaving to a sector of society frustrated and excluded and why it is draining the economy. And I`ll even be telling you about DeVry , an organisation behind a chain of universities owned by share-holders and run for profit which claims it is helping poorer people get an excellent education. It sounds counter-intuitive. See if you are convinced.

But inevitably the emotional issue of tuition fees was the most hotly debated matter in Salzburg. Florian Kaiser of the European Students Union is very concerned at how the austerity measures in Europe are cutting in public investment into European higher education. He is worried that more European countries turning to tuition fees at ever higher levels to fund their post-school learning. “Tuition fees and student loans are not the answer for an inclusive society,” he insists.

I turned to Gilbert Rochon, the African-American president of Tuskegee University in the USA, for an American perspective on student fees and whether they inhibit poorer sections of society from studying. The system in the USA is obviously different, but I was interested in the long experience American students have of living with debt. Rochon grew up in a relatively modest social environment, going to Xavier University in New Orleans before taking post-graduate degrees at Yale and the MIT. He says students have become “inured” to the prospect of building up five-figure debts because they now they are “on forgiveness” while studying, only having to pay them back four years after terminating their studies at rates of around 3% which are “not crippling for a wage earner.”

But is the idea of having such a huge debt on your back psychologically crippling? What, for example, if you don’t finish your studies? Rochon says it is a question of “not seeing it as a debt but as an investment in your own future.” He argues that there is such a premium on the volume of the salary you can command with a significant university degree under your belt that the initial outlay seems “like a pittance compared to the rewards you can reap later.” He also points to mechanism which allows for ‘loan forgiveness’ in return for work as a teacher or health worker in deprived areas.
Florian Kaiser would hate to see such a system adopted in Europe, arguing that the state will take enough taxes from high earning graduates to make a “healthy profit” on any public investment in educating students.

But what is European strategy overall? Margaret Waters, from the Higher Education Unit at the European Commission, says we need to "modernise" the higher education system. By that she means diversifying the system so that it extends beyond traditional elite universities and involves more wide-reaching technical institutions that equip “young people with the skills they need to thrive in the modern world.” She points out that, in an era of high unemployment, there are is a massive paradox. “We don’t have the highly skilled people to fill the highly skilled jobs we are creating. At the moment there is a 9 million shortfall. She insists that doesn’t mean turning European higher education into a “job factory” and that European higher education will still have “the creation of knowledge at its core” but that we do need to provide more people with the skills they need to survive on a rapidly developing and extremely competitive global labour market.

Faced with debts and an uncertain future, it is a worrying time for European students. Perhaps I should end with a ray of light. One thing we can all agree on is the programme that Waters is most proud of – the, a European Union’ Erasmus exchange programme which celebrated its 25th birthday this year. She feels the exchange has made people more flexible and deepened European understanding. She sees this as a weapon against the growing inter-European xenophobia we are seeing in the economic crisis. Which is surely true: but I like how the Italian writer Umberto Eco characterized it in an interview in the Guardian: "a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children."

After all, studying was always about more than just books and future jobs.

"Inclusive Higher Education"

This Saturday's Reality Check Special (12-13) with Chris Cummins.