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The State of Higher Education in 1994 and Prospects
for the Future |
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As the decade of the 1990s opened, the Institute
of International Education in New York and the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) organised a conference to
help assess what the needs and demand for overseas education
might be in the coming decade. The report from this conference
has been one of the documents made available to the Commission.
[ed. Craufurd D. Goodwin, International Investment in Human
Capital Overseas Education for Development, Institute of
International Education, New York, 1993.] Our secretary, Mr.
Sutton, contributed a paper in that report that made an effort
to envisage broadly "The World in the 1990s" and gave particular
attention to "Education, Modern Knowledge and National Cultures
in the Third World." He found the evident uses of education
for both national and individual advancement had continued to
produce "an extraordinary demand for schools and universities"
which national leaders felt bound to respond to. The pressures
to over-expansion in higher education which the Harvard Committee
observed were continuing : |
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"Political leaders have found the demands of
their citizenries for higher educational opportunities irresistible,
and the common condition Of overcrowded, ill-equipped and frequently
turbulent institutions of advanced education have resulted.
We have had the melancholy spectacle of countries as poor as
Sudan, Madagascar, Kenya, and Tanzania planning new universities
when they lacked the means for adequate support of what they
already had." |
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The resulting "glut of diplomas" in the Third
World had been combined with a pained awareness that even a
relatively few university graduates in a poor country can produce
glut in the market for employment. The UNESCO World Education
Report (1993) may point out that Tanzania has only 21 students
in higher education per 100,000 population whereas Canada has
5,102; but this disparity does not imply that producing more
Tanzanian graduates would in any early future be a rewarding
investment in that country. The sense of inequity in the denial
of educational opportunity to citizens of poor countries has,
in recent decades, been countered by arguments that higher education
chiefly benefits a favoured minority at the expense of the population
at large. The World Bank has used cost-benefit studies to show
that investments in primary or secondary education in developing
countries bring higher social benefits than investments in higher
education. It has correspondingly argued restraint in the expansion
of higher education and has found sympathetic agreement among
other agencies engaged in development assistance. |
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The argument in the Harvard Report that adding
the Aga Khan University to the array of universities serving
the Muslim and Third Worlds could not find justification as
a mere quantitative addition thus finds continuing support.
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There may be legitimate argument whether the average
quality of higher education across the Third World is better
or worse than it was in 1983. But in areas of particular concern
to the Aga Khan University, there seems a clear case for worsening.
The deterioration of the African universities as economic conditions
worsened in the 1980s has been notorious. Our Secretary's report
on his visit to Nairobi in June 1994 included lamentable particulars
on the collapse of higher education in Kenya, where overly rapid
expansion with limited resources has led to student and faculty
strikes and the closure of the five national universities for
much of the past two years. And one finds a Pakistani newspaper
article in 1993 echoing the laments heard in 1983, indeed generalising
to declare that all through South Asia, "the system of higher
education has collapsed". [Dawn, November 21, 1993, p.15]
But it is not necessary to argue that there has been serious
further general deterioration of higher education across the
parts of the world of interest to us to conclude that there
is a continuing need for institutions like AKU that bring not
merely quantitative additions but new elements of quality in
higher education. |
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