Caribbean Journal of Education, 17, 191-195 (1995).
The UWI has embarked upon an ambitious development plan which presupposes various changes in its social and economic position. Universities elsewhere have been caught up in often radical reconstruction of their place in society. One question readers of this journal might reasonably ask of the World Bank Discussion Paper under review is whether its survey of higher education in Latin America can teach us any lessons in the English-speaking Caribbean.
Such a question ignores the primary, intrinsic interest of the data and discussion: 38 tables and 29 annexes, mostly of statistics relating to enrollment, access and financing of higher education in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of the hemisphere. The discussion, while fairly brief, is aware of the precariousness of the indicators and procedures used to answer large questions of efficiency and equity in the operations of higher education, and also of the tremendous diversity about which it hopes to generalize. It reveals, too, some idiosyncratic features of Latin American higher education, especially the very strong role of students in its management, which may well block any quick extrapolations. But many of the issues addressed are general, and the territories contributing to UWI have faced similar economic trials in the recent past while responding to increasing numbers and increasing demands for university-style certification, so our parochial question might receive a worthwhile answer.
A brief introductory chapter shows that enrollment and government spending on higher education in Latin America increased dramatically between 1960 and 1980 - enrollment being 16% of 20-24 year-olds in 1985, a figure close to the developed world average, and public spending on education, and on higher education as a sector, as a share of the government budget in 1980 being higher than in the developed world. As our Vice-Chancellor often remarks, the English-speaking Caribbean has a long way to catch up with respect to enrollments (official estimates for Jamaica in 1990 [data from Economic and Social Survey Jamaica 1990, Planning Institute of Jamaica, 1991] give an enrollment rate of only 7% but with public spending on "education, training and cultural development" as 13.7% of the budget, the same as the 1980 developed world figure in Winkler, 22.8% of which went to the tertiary level, as against 19.1% in the developed world in 1980).
The 1980s witnessed a slow down in growth and large cuts in public spending, reflected in lower real salaries. Winkler notes the range of institutions and the varying size of the private higher education sector in different countries, and remarks that the newer "private institutions are only loosely regulated and almost never evaluated" (p. 8) so that, while often providing increased access to education, very little is known about their quality. It is perhaps not surprising, but worth remembering in the context of hopes to share educational burdens with the private sector, that its role seems to depend largely on whether governments expand provision at the expense of quality: Brazil and Columbia have more students in private institutions but the public ones are the more prestigious, while in Mexico and Peru the small private sectors "have a disproportionate share of high quality instructional programs" (p. 10).
Chapter 2 discusses the "internal efficiency" of the system, mainly the allocation of resources within educational institutions. Winkler recognizes that measuring cost-effectiveness (average cost per unit of output of a given quality) is difficult in the context of higher education generally, and more so in the present case because of limited or non-existent information. But he nonetheless lists a good number of factors that probably cause either excessive costs or inadequate quality. Some are, one hopes, unlikely to be found in the UWI - the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico, a giant institution with enrollments of over 300,000, allows Faculties to do their own hiring, with an extreme result in 1984 of a Faculty with 11,000 students serviced by 6,669 staff! But others already have been - low salaries encouraging second jobs and the avoidance of university duties, and a marked decline in non-salary recurrent and capital expenditure. Winkler also notes the dangers, particularly in private institutions, of an excessive reliance on part-time teachers. And finally he notes that universities generally "lack strong incentives to improve internal efficiency or quality of academic performance" (p. 16), a situation that has changed somewhat in Europe and North America.
Winkler briefly discusses the impossibility of actually measuring productivity and the consequent need to rely on surrogate measures of quality and efficiency. One notable aspect of the Latin American situation one hopes not to see here is the remarkably low proportion of entrants who finally graduate (in Peru in 1983, for instance, an average of less than 10%). Elsewhere Winkler suggests that governments are in effect paying many students to repeat years of "study" waiting until a satisfactory job opening appears.
Just as what one wants to consider with respect to internal efficiency is unavailable for a variety of reasons, so external efficiency, the question whether a society's resources could be better employed than in higher education, boils down to the gain in earnings associated with instructional activities. Chapter 3 notes that the expansion of higher education has outpaced demand for such college-educated labour. Winkler leaves open the extent to which college-educated labour is now taking positions previously filled by less educated employees, but he notes the possibility of extensive underemployment. In this chapter Winkler repeats the common argument that because rates of return to primary education far exceed those to higher education, "reallocating public resources from higher to primary education would improve the overall return to society's investment in education" (p. 41). This type of argument may work when one is choosing between treasury bonds at 12% and a savings account at 7%, but in the case of education and society, for one thing the rates are not fixed (for example, the social rates of return Winkler gives for primary schooling in Venezuela move from 82% in 1957 to 16.4% in 1975) and for another the argument overlooks the possibility that some investment at the higher level is indispensable - Venezuela, or Trinidad, could switch funds from training in petrochemical engineering to primary schooling, but arguably such a change would not maximize anything. Given the enormous existing inequalities in income and wealth, one may also wonder whether one would want a situation in which returns to higher education were larger than they already are.
The spectre of homo economicus is also apparent in Winkler's brief discussion of why rational agents do not enroll in larger numbers in fields such as engineering, with a high private rate of return (p. 47). He notes that universities do not supply the wanted places, that students choose careers on the basis of successfully employed individuals, thereby overlooking unemployment and underemployment in their field, and that many students lack the prerequisite secondary training (which merely shifts his problem back a stage). One small thing he omits is that perhaps not everyone wants to be an engineer - some people actually want to be teachers.
Chapter 4 focuses on questions of equity: unequal access to higher education and the injustice of the resulting redistribution of income. Access is skewed in favour of white collar families, and families where the father has more formal education. Gender differences remain within the system, although overall participation rates are getting close to equality. Living in a major metropolitan area is also a considerable advantage in gaining access to higher education. Winkler notes the contribution to the pattern of unequal access of inadequate schooling, but also of inflexible timetabling by the universities themselves which fail to provide courses at times convenient for working people. Here again market pressures have forced private institutions to do what the public universities disdain. Winkler also notes another self-inflicted factor: the sheer bureaucratic difficulties of being admitted.
Chapter 4 concludes with some discussion of the overall effect of public spending on higher education with respect to income distribution. Of five countries studied, only in Chile does such spending appear to have a "mild equalizing effect" (p. 63); in Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay higher education spending leaves other inequalities unchanged, while, nearer home in the Dominican Republic, spending on higher education actually increases inequality in the distribution of income. Given the uniform pricing of higher education, it is not surprising that Winkler recommends some measures to reduce the relative cost of higher education for poorer students. For one who benefitted from English, pre-Thatcher provisions, the reluctance in Jamaica to introduce means-related fees or support remains a mystery, since they provide an obvious way of addressing our own problem of dubiously equitable expenditures on higher education (the 1990 estimates used above do not address class inequities, but do reveal that $34,290 is spent on each UWI student as against $1087 for each child at primary school). A related issue arises in the fifth chapter, on financing education, where Winkler recommends increased and more efficient use of student loans. Despite the political cost of raising fees, Winkler's claim here that such increases will have little effect on enrollment (p. 83) seems to be supported by our own experience after the imposition of the cess in 1986 (Jamaican applicants for the B.Ed. numbered 187 in 1985, 133 in 1986; 183 in 1987; 384 in 1988).
The final factual chapter concerns research and graduate education. Despite some curious measures (ratios of "researchers" to "authors", for example) that fail to connect with the quality of research output, Winkler's discussion makes some sensible and generalizable points: despite teaching loads designed to permit research, few academic staff actually do any; too many small graduate programmes disperse effort and prevent the development of "the critical mass in terms of both students and faculty to develop true centers of excellence" (p. 97).
I have tried to indicate some of the issues Winkler discusses that deserve examination in our own context. Such further examination may, however, require one to go beyond the narrowly economic framework that Winkler chooses. Overall, Winkler's remarks allow one to see many of the social and institutional obstacles to the economic rationality he advocates. Just as it is helpful to distinguish the various educational and non-educational tasks now allotted to the school system, so we should for higher education too. No doubt, low-cost non-traditional means can be found for rapid technology and skill transfer - it is questionable (on economic grounds, if on no other) whether such jobs should be given to a more traditional research and educational institution. Elite cultural reproduction, cultural empowerment for dominated groups; such issues hardly get on Winkler's agenda for higher education though they are among the more significant social functions of university education in developing countries. Still for all that, Winkler's data are a starting point - one would like to see comparable data for our own region; its provision is one of his many policy recommendations we can wholeheartedly endorse.
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