What the expansion of higher education means for graduates in the labour market

by Markus Schwabe
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills

A university degree has always been considered as key to a good job and higher wages. But as the share of tertiary-educated adults across OECD countries has almost doubled over the last two decades, can the labour market absorb this growing supply of skills? At first glance, the answer isn’t encouraging: the number of unemployed tertiary-educated adults has been increasing across OECD countries for many years. However, a closer look reveals that the unemployment rate for these adults is still much lower than for those without a university degree.

The latest Education Indicators in Focus policy brief analyses long-term trends in employment outcomes of adults based on their highest level of educational attainment. The figure above shows that, in all OECD countries, adults with tertiary education still enjoy higher employment rates than those without by 10 percentage points, on average, and this advantage has changed little over the past two decades.

While this might seem reassuring, in some countries the reality is more troubling. In Korea, for example, labour market demand has not kept pace with an ever-increasing supply of tertiary graduates. As a result, the employment advantage of tertiary-educated adults decreased slightly, by 0.6 point, between 1995 and 2006. In 1995, tertiary-educated adults in Korea were 13% more likely to be employed than those with an upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education; today they are only 6% more likely to have a job. With 70% of young adults in Korea holding a tertiary degree, some might wonder whether tertiary expansion has reached its limit. But with populations of school-aged children shrinking across OECD countries, the worry about too many university graduates competing for too few high-skilled jobs might prove to be misplaced.

The “knowledge economy” has increased the demand for better-educated and well-skilled workers. But in many countries, even as enrolments in higher education have grown, companies still report that they cannot find workers with the skills they are looking for. While technological progress and globalisation continue to challenge education systems, automation and digitalisation will be, in the words of two Harvard economists*, an ongoing “race between education and technology”. Countries should thus worry less about the share of tertiary-educated adults in the labour force and more about the skills that education provides. Ensuring that the skills students graduate with are relevant to the labour market will go a long way towards making the expansion of higher education sustainable – and beneficial for all.

*Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz in their book The Race between Education and Technology (2008), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap.

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 57 - Is labour market demand keeping pace with the rising educational attainment of the population?
Education at a Glance 2017 - OECD Indicators

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Is the growth of international student mobility coming to a halt?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Skills Beyond School Division,  Directorate for Education and Skills

Higher education is one of the most globally integrated systems of the modern world. There still are important barriers to the international recognition of degrees or the transfer of credits, but some of the basic features of higher education enjoy global convergence and collaboration. This is most visible in the research area, where advanced research is now carried out in international networks. But also in the field of teaching and learning, the international dimension has become very important. The so-called European Higher Education Area stands out as an area where degree structures, credit transfer arrangements and quality assurance frameworks have been aligned in order to adjust qualifications with the needs of an integrated labour market.

Yet, higher education is also one of the most unequal and hierarchical systems of the modern world; globalisation has not yet made the world of higher education a ‘flat’ one. There are huge imbalances between the quantitative supply and demand of education. And the imbalance in quality is even more striking: using an imperfect measure of quality such as the one provided by the global university rankings, one can immediately see that the perceived quality and reputation of academic institutions is concentrated in just a few countries, while the demand is exploding in other parts of the world. The academic top league (say, the top 50 institutions in any of the global rankings) is particularly concentrated, and because of the metrics used to determine quality it is very difficult for institutions in other parts of the world to enter that club.

To some extent international student mobility can be seen as a consequence of global academic inequality. Students are moving to other parts of the globe in order to find the best possible education their money can buy. International student mobility is one of the ways through which the geographical gap between supply and demand is being overcome. Investing resources in one’s son or daughter in order to secure them a high-quality credential has become a preferred strategy of affluent middle class families in emerging countries, especially after their purchasing power started to increase. The chart above shows that for many years the total number of international students remained rather stable around 1 million, but that from the 1990s onwards the numbers started to grow significantly. Some countries were quick to tap into this opportunity and developed strategies to market their higher education offer. From 0.8 million in 1975, the number rose to 4.2 million thirty-five years later.

Many people expected the growth to continue and even to accelerate. But that is not what happened, as is also clear from the chart. From 2012 onwards the growth really stopped. Between 2012 and 2015 a mere 100 thousand students were added to the 4.5 million. The recent figures, published in the OECD’s latest Education at a Glance, suggest that it is not just a temporary setback, but a more structural phenomenon.

What could be the reasons for this change? We probably need to look at developments both on the demand and the supply side. Regarding the former, the obvious explanation is the improvement of domestic education in the most important countries of origin. China, and to a lesser extent India, have invested huge resources in developing their higher education system, including a select number of universities that are predestined to achieve world-class status in the next few years. Chinese universities are now aggressively entering the global rankings and continue to improve their ranks every single year. Changing prospects at home have an impact on the investments strategies of affluent middle-class families in these nations.

Still, changes on the demand side alone cannot explain the lack of growth. Indeed, the potential reservoir of interested students in these countries remains immense. We also have to look at the supply side, to developments in the main countries of destination. It is evident that in the main countries active in the field of exporting education services, things have fundamentally changed as well. From a very hospitable and welcoming approach to international students, popular and political attitudes have reversed things into a much more hostile stance. This has happened in the main destination countries such as Australia, the UK and the US, but also in upcoming players such as Switzerland, Sweden or the Netherlands. The general backlash against migration, aggravated by the refugee crisis and the flows of asylum seekers, has also turned the climate for foreign students upside down. Populist and often false accusations that foreign students are only interested in permanent migration, and that they take the future jobs of domestic students, are now in the media every day.

The recent 2017 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange data, published by the Institute of International Education (IIE), points to a decrease of 7% in the numbers of new international students enrolling in US higher education institutions. The majority of surveyed institutions (52%) in the IIE survey expressed concern that the country’s social and political climate could deter prospective international students. In the UK, a political decision is being discussed of removing international students from the government’s target of reducing net immigration. Still, Brexit and a general hostile climate against migration in the UK is probably also becoming a deterrent for international students. Similar developments can be seen in other countries of destination.

What is happening at both the demand and supply side of international higher education is fundamentally reshaping the size and direction of international student mobility flows. In a strange way, they are reshaping the global academic inequalities. At the same time they are also redefining where and how the future professionals and leaders of the 21st century world will be educated. Just as much as academic education was an important instrument in shaping the post-WWII global order, the current changes in international education will have a profound impact on the 21st century world.

Links 
Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators
Open Doors 2017

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Is free higher education fair?

by Andreas Schleicher 

Director, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Skills have become the currency of 21st century economies and, despite the significant increase the UK has seen in university graduation over the last decade, the earnings of workers with a Master’s degree remain over 80% higher than those of workers with just five good GCSEs or an equivalent vocational qualification. Sure, not every university graduate will end up with a great salary, but the claim that for many studying does not pay is a myth: just one in 10 university graduates earn less than half the median salary, a figure which is double for adults with only five good GCSEs, and another 22% of graduates earn between half the median and the median salary. Conversely, 21% earn more than twice the median, three times more than those with five good GCESs. Beyond the monetary benefits, higher education brings important social benefits for individuals and nations, ranging from better health through to greater social participation, and up to more trust in people and institutions.

Some say these trends are all futures of the past, and that the job prospects of future graduates may look much worse, particularly if bringing in more and more people eventually means including less qualified applicants. But people have been saying these things ever since I began tracking those numbers over a decade ago, and the bottom line is that, so far, the rise in knowledge workers has generally not led to a decline in their pay, as we have seen for people at the lower end of the skills spectrum.

That brings up the question of who should pay for this, because there simply is no free university education.

The Nordic countries in Europe pay for universities through the public purse and some even generously subsidise the living costs of university students. It makes sense for them because participation is almost universal and they have a steeply progressive tax system so that they can recuperate the funds from graduates who typically end up as the better earners.

European countries like France or Germany, too, say higher education is important, but their governments are neither willing to put in the required funds nor allowing most of their universities to charge tuition. They end up compromising quality and limiting provision, with the effect that all workers end up paying for the university education of the rich parents’ children. That is, because wherever access is limited, it tends to be the wealthiest and not the smartest students who get the best places, whatever the source of funds.

The third alternative is to allow universities to charge tuition, and interestingly, OECD data show absolutely no cross-country relationship between the level of tuition fees countries charge and the participation of disadvantaged youth in tertiary education. In fact, social mobility is worse in Germany, which pays for all almost university education through the public purse, than it is in the UK. That is because to mobilise those public funds for higher education, Germany ends up charging tuition for children in kindergarten, which leads to a much less level playing field from the start.

But getting tuition right is not simple either. If countries put the burden for tuition entirely on the shoulders of families, they risk not attracting the brightest but instead the wealthiest children to attend, which means not making the most out of the country’s talent.

If countries rely mainly on commercial loans which students have to repay once they finish their studies, they still leave students and families with the risk, because the promise of greater lifetime earnings of graduates is a statistical one, and there is actually very wide dispersion in earnings. The UK, and some other countries too, have tried to square that circle with a combination of income-contingent loans and means-tested grants. That basically means risk-free access to financing for prospective students with governments leveraging, but not paying, for the costs.

The loans reduce the liquidity constraints faced by individuals at the time of study, while the income-contingent nature of the loans system addresses the risk and uncertainty faced by individuals (insurance against inability to repay) and improves the progressiveness of the overall system (lower public subsidy for graduates with higher private returns). In the UK, the repayments of graduates correspond to a proportion of their earnings and low earners make low or no repayments, and graduates with low lifetime earnings end up not repaying their loans in full.

But even the best loan system is often not sufficient. There is ample evidence that young people from low income families or from families with poorly educated parents (but also youth who just don't have good information on the benefits of tertiary education) underestimate the net benefits of tertiary education. That’s why it has paid off for the UK to complement the loan scheme with means-tested grants or tuition waivers for vulnerable groups. It will be worth it to continue to do so, simply because people with better education will pay much more in taxes than what their education costs.

Sure, those loan and grant systems cost money, and have shifted risks to government which will end up paying for any bad debt. Indeed, it is very likely that repayment rates will end up a lot lower compared to what the Government anticipated in 2012. But these costs are just a tiny fraction of the added fiscal income due to better educated individuals paying higher taxes, let alone the social benefits. Keep in mind that the added tax income of those graduates who end up in employment, on average over £80 000 in the UK, is many times larger than any conceivable bad debt. And where students don’t pay their loans back, tuition will still have had important effects in terms of having students choose their studies carefully and complete them on time, something where the UK does so much better than most other European countries.

Every year I am reading media stories that the financial burden on students, perceived or real, is choking off entry into higher education. But every year our statistics show a rise in entry to higher education. It’s also noteworthy that the UK ranks second after New Zealand when it comes to the share of international students, which is another indicator of the attractiveness of UK higher education.

Still, there is a lot the UK can do to further improve its approach to financing universities. For a start, it can do better with aligning course offerings with societal demand. That may also mean thinking more carefully about fee structures, ensuring that these better reflect the cost of provision and the value to students. Indeed, it is crucial to ensure that fees reflect the educational value of the programmes for students, rather than the amounts that universities can extract from students simply because graduates can expect higher lifetime earnings that also reflect their prior attainment.

Consider that England currently has an above-average share of low-skilled 20-34 year-old graduates, but an above-average share of tertiary graduates. Any increases in tuition fees must therefore demonstrably go into better teaching and learning. The Framework of Excellence makes a start to address this, but it does not yet adequately capture the most important element in this regard: the value that universities add to student learning outcomes.

I also worry that the loan repayment parameters mean that many middle income workers – such as teachers, health professionals, public sector workers – will end up paying more for their education than better earners such as lawyers and bankers. Not least, it needs to be kept in mind that many UK students are likely to have some level of debt for up to 30 years and some research on the broader implications of student debt would be important. Contrast this with Australian students who pay off the loan for their undergraduate degree within nine years of graduation.

That being said, among all available approaches, a system of income-contingent loans and means-tested grants is still the most scalable and sustainable approach to university finance. From a public policy point of view, governments should invest public resources in education over the lifetime of a young person in those stages where its impact is greatest, both in terms of efficiency and equity. Higher education is not high on that list.

Links 
Education at a Glance 2017: How much do tertiary students pay and what public support do they receive?
Enhancing higher education system performance: Benchmarking higher education system performance

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDEAG

Image source: @Shutterstock

Awarding – and imagining – teaching excellence

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Tonight, the winners of the Higher Education Academy’s newly launched Global Teaching Excellence Award will be announced. The award is a milestone in advancing the higher education agenda. It’s time for teaching excellence to attain the same status and recognition as academic research, which still seems the dominant metric for valuing academic institutions, whether we look at rankings published in the media or research assessment frameworks or at performance-based funding for research.

There are compelling reasons to change this, and the award makes a start.

Tertiary qualifications have become the entrance ticket for modern societies. Never before have those with advanced qualifications had the life chances they enjoy today, and never before have those who struggled to acquire a good education paid the price they pay today. There are always those who argue that the share of young people entering higher education or advanced vocational programmes is too large. But they are usually talking about other people’s children. In the past century, they would have probably argued that there are too many children in high school.

The evidence is clear. On average across OECD countries, men with at least a bachelor’s degree earn over ÚSD 300 000 more than what they paid for their education or lose in earnings while studying, compared with those who only have a high school degree. And taxpayers too realise a return of over USD 200 000 per tertiary graduate in higher public revenues and lower social transfers. It is hard to think of a better investment at a time when knowledge and skills have become the currency of modern societies and economies. And despite the burgeoning number of graduates, we have seen no decline in their relative pay, which is so different from those with fewer qualifications.

But it’s also clear that this entrance ticket to the knowledge society is expensive; and people are generally allotted just one. That makes it so important to get it right. And this is where teaching excellence comes in. We all know that more education alone doesn't automatically translate into better jobs and better lives. We might know graduates who can’t find a job even as we hear employers lament that they can’t find people with the skills they need. Teaching excellence is about ensuring that the right mix of knowledge and skills is delivered in effective, equitable and efficient ways.

And the value of teaching is only bound to rise as digitalisation unbundles educational content, delivery and accreditation in higher education. In the digital age, anything that today you call your proprietary knowledge and content is going to be a commodity available to everyone tomorrow. Accreditation still gives universities enormous power to extract monopoly rents, but just think a few years ahead. What will micro-credentialling do to this system? Or think of what happens when all employers can see beyond degrees to the knowledge and skills that prospective employees actually have. That leaves the quality of teaching as perhaps the most valuable asset of modern higher education institutions. It becomes harder for universities to hide poor teaching behind great research. We are living in this digital bazaar and anything that is not built for the network age is going to crack apart under the pressure.

Future jobs are likely to pair computer intelligence with the creative, social and emotional skills, attitudes and values of human beings. It will then be our capacity to innovate, our awareness and our sense of responsibility that will harness the power of the machines to shape the world for the better. That means faculty need to look for outcomes that are fresh and original, that contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. Achieving these outcomes is likely to involve entrepreneurialism, imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence and collaboration.

As a result, universities’ previous priority of preparing a select few for research has given way to providing up to half the population with advanced knowledge and skills. The result has been the rapid expansion of the higher education sector and the establishment of more diverse types of higher education institutions. There are now over 18 000 higher education institutions in 180 countries that offer at least a post-graduate degree or a four-year professional diploma.

This historic shift has been accompanied by changes in funding regimes. The rising costs of higher education are increasingly borne by students themselves (see, for example, the United Kingdom). So it follows that students are becoming more discriminating consumers. And in choosing between universities, they are also thinking ahead about securing future employment. In response, institutions are competing to provide more relevant knowledge and skills through more effective teaching.

These sweeping developments in the higher education marketplace are intensifying competition. Indeed, a global education market has emerged. In 2015, there were 3.3 million students travelling across OECD countries to study. Others look to the new, internationally available, digital platforms to provide or supplement their learning.

Taken together, these developments have created an urgent demand for data to measure and improve the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Institutions need data to build on competitive strengths and address weaknesses. Governments need data to determine policy and funding priorities. Employers need data to assess the value of qualifications. And, perhaps most important, students themselves need data so that they can make informed decisions about their preferred place of study and show prospective employers evidence of what they have learned.

But these demands are still often unmet. Without such data, judgements about the quality of higher education institutions will continue to be made on the basis of flawed rankings, derived not from outcomes, nor even outputs, but from idiosyncratic inputs and reputation surveys.

Everyone knows how important data are to me, but I’m also well aware that throwing data into the public space does not, in itself, change the ways students learn, faculty teach and universities operate. We need to get out of the “read-only” mode of our education systems, in which information is presented in a way that cannot be altered. To really change education practice, we need to combine transparency with collaboration.

I am always struck by the power of “collaborative consumption”, where online markets are created in which people share their cars and even their apartments with total strangers. Collaborative consumption has made people micro-entrepreneurs; and collaborative consumption is fuelled by building trust between strangers.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is not only that it serves individual learners and educators, but that it can create an ecosystem around learning. Technology can build communities of learners that make learning more social and more fun. And it can build communities of faculty to share and enrich teaching resources and practices. Imagine the power of a higher education system that could meaningfully share all of the expertise and experience of its faculty.

What if we could get faculty working on curated crowd-sourcing of best teaching practice, and perhaps even across institutional and national borders? Technology could create a giant open-source community of faculty, unlocking the creative skills and initiative of so many people simply by tapping into the desire of people to contribute, collaborate and be recognised for it. And we could use technologies to liberate learning from past conventions, connecting learners in new ways, with new sources of knowledge, with innovative applications and with one another. Maybe that’s something for next year’s teaching excellence award.


For the latest data on tertiary education, look out for Education at a Glance 2017, which will be published on 12 September.

Links

Global Teaching Excellence Award

Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators

Photo credit: @shutterstock 

How education can spur progress towards inclusive growth

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Costa Rica is recognised across Latin America as a leader in education. The country was among the first in the region to enrol all children in primary school and combat adult illiteracy. Today, one in two young adults has completed secondary education, up from one in three among their parents’ generation. But, the demands placed on the skills of people have evolved as well. The overall context has become more challenging too: Economic growth has slowed, inequality is rising and productivity is weak in a labour market that shows a growing divide between a well-paid, high-skilled sector and a precarious informal economy. The OECD report, Education in Costa Rica, looks at how education can help Costa Rica turn these negative trends around.

The first step is to build strong foundations. Pre-primary education has become nearly universal in most OECD countries; but in Costa Rica, only 63% of children benefit from two years of preschool, and very few children under three have access to any form of early care and education. Strong, sustained support to promising initiatives, such as the new policy framework for early childhood and the preschool curriculum, will ensure that more children start school with the socio-emotional and cognitive skills that they need to learn. More flexible community-based services can accelerate the expansion of early education into rural areas.

The quality of education can never exceed the quality of teachers. Costa Rica is working towards ensuring minimum standards in the teaching profession by requiring private universities to accredit initial teaching degrees. The challenge  now is to advance from recruiting those candidates with the greatest potential for effective teaching towards promoting continuous professional development through regular feedback and more opportunities for peer learning within and across schools.

If all students are to complete at least secondary school, then the content, structure and certification of learning at this level need to respond to an increasingly diverse student population. Nearly one in three 15-year-olds is not in school, and among those who are, another one in three lacks core competencies in science, reading and mathematics. The programme Yo me Apunto, which allocates more resources to disadvantaged schools to prevent students from dropping out, should be supported and combined with an expansion of vocational courses and alternative forms of certification to help more students make a smooth transition from school to employment.

Costa Rica’s tertiary sector also has an important role to play  in fostering inclusive growth. Just one in ten students from a disadvantaged background makes it to university, and only 12% of tertiary programmes have been accredited. It is time for Costa Rica to embrace comprehensive reform of the governance, funding and quality-assurance systems of both private and public universities to respond to changing social and economic needs. This, in turn, requires much better data on tertiary performance so that students can make informed choices about their future, and institutions can be held accountable for meeting their own and their country’s objectives.

Costa Rica is rightly admired for making education the cornerstone of its development. It invests 7.6% of its GDP in education – a larger share than that of any OECD country. But those resources need to be invested strategically. If it does so, Costa Rica will be able to spur more inclusive growth and build on its remarkable achievements in human development and well-being.

Links
Reviews of National Policies for Education: Education in Costa Rica
Brochure: Education in Costa Rica, Highlights 2017 (English) and (Spanish)
Press release: Costa Rica should ensure that all children have access to quality education (English) and (Spanish)
Slides: Avances y desafíos de la educación en Costa Rica: una perspectiva internacional (Spanish)

Photo credit: MEP (Ministerio de Educación Pública)

Who pays for universities: taxpayers or students?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

There are few issues in education that raise as much political and ideological controversy as tuition fees for higher education. Across many countries a broad consensus has developed that public education in the age of compulsory schooling should be free of charge. Even Adam Smith considered free public education for the young as a central obligation of the state, for which the cost should be shared through taxes. But the question of how to distribute the financial cost of education beyond the age of compulsory schooling – for early childhood education, adult education and training and/or, especially, higher education – has kindled heated debates in recent years, particularly as national budgets shrink and the cost of high-quality education balloons.

Education at a Glance has documented the shift towards greater private funding of higher education in many countries over the past years. The rationale for this shift is the continuously high and even increasing financial returns that a higher education degree generates over a lifetime. Higher education could thus be considered a private investment for which individuals should bear most of the cost. Funding higher education with taxpayers’ money risks a reverse redistribution of social wealth from the poor to the rich, thus aggravating, rather than reducing, social inequality. The state’s responsibility is to design a framework for equitable and transparent funding regimes that also ensures access for students from poorer families through financial support systems of grants and scholarships. These arguments have convinced increasing numbers of governments to shift the burden of financing higher education to students and families.

Yet some countries maintain a welfare state-oriented social contract for higher education, where the cost of universities, like the cost of other social, cultural and educational services, is paid through progressive taxation. The private financial return on a higher education degree is largely skimmed off, through high and progressive income taxes, to become a high public return on the state’s investment. Open access and high enrolment rates prevent the system from working to the advantage of only a small part of the population. However, this model only works in a political system where high income taxes to support general social and educational services are widely accepted.

These divergent views are reflected in the huge differences in the amount that students and families have to pay for a year of university education. The most recent Education Indicators in Focus provides new data on tuition fees. The chart above presents the average annual tuition fees in a range of countries with comparable data. The chart clearly shows that the private cost of higher education, in the form of tuition fees, differs widely among countries. Obviously, within each country tuition fees for individual institutions can also vary; but the national average gives a good idea of the general approach and political preferences of a country.

On the top are countries where the cost is highly privatised; on the bottom are countries where higher education is funded through taxation, hence with no or limited tuition fees. The group on the top includes liberal market economies in the English-speaking world and Asian market economies, but also emerging economies with expanding higher education systems, such as Colombia. The group on the bottom is mainly composed of Nordic welfare states and some transition economies. In the middle section are countries that adhere to a mixture of both ideological positions.

Each model has strengths and weaknesses, not to mention technical challenges. Countries where the cost is privatised need to develop fair and transparent ways to set tuition fees. For example, tuition could be related to field of study and, ultimately, future earnings. These countries also need to determine conditions for loan systems and their income-contingent and means-tested repayment schemes. And above all, they need to secure equitable access to higher education through student support and financial aid schemes. If these policy conditions are met, these systems seem to be able to secure sustainable funding for universities.

Countries with a welfare-state model of funding higher education see participation in higher education as a right to which all capable students are entitled. The high long-term social and economic public returns – generally much higher than the direct costs for the state – ensure that the upfront investments in higher education pay themselves back in higher incomes taxes and lower social security expenses. The main challenge for such countries is to assume the fiscal consequences. Shrinking state budgets and growing resistance to high levels of taxation in such countries might result in dwindling funding for higher education – and for university-based research and innovation that fuels the knowledge economy.

But the most serious risks are for the countries in the middle section of the chart, those that don’t seem to be able to make a clear policy choice.  They might combine the risks of the two models but without enjoying their benefits, leading to a deadlock on both the public and the private side of the funding mix. In these countries, universities pay the price of political indecisiveness.

Ideologies always claim absolute validity of their arguments. Yet in policy making the challenge is to find the smartest approach that yields the best outcomes the most efficiently. What 21st-century knowledge economies need is a system of higher education that generates globally competitive research and innovation and provides high-quality education that is accessible to all talented students. This doesn’t come cheap, and countries have to assume the cost, whether through public and/or private funding. But the long-term price of underfunding higher education is much higher than the short-term cost to both taxpayers and students. An inability to make a clear policy choice seems to be the costliest (non-)choice of all.

Links:
How much do tertiary students pay and what public support do they receive? Education Indicators in Focus, issue No. 41, by Eric Charbonnier
Combien les étudiants paient-ils et de quelles aides publiques bénéficient-ils ? Les indicateurs de l'éducation à la loupe, issue No. 41 (French Version)
Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators
Chart source: OECD (2015), Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2015-en, Table B5.1.