PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

The next casualty of the financial crisis: public universities

Roger Goodman of Moody's credit rating agency has a prediction:

With policies of limiting enrollment places and tuition fees, market pressure to add capacity, and government funding unlikely to increase, Moody’s expects unprecedented pressure on the current financial model of public universities.

While universities in the rich world have been early casualities of the crisis (Harvard and Yale have earned the moniker of Big Losers from the Wall Street Journal because of the performance of their endowments), public universities in emerging markets have been shielded by the longer cycle of public budgeting and the stimulus spending of some governments. But that won't last forever.

When the squeeze on their finances arrives, public universities will basically have two choices. They can either ration education by limiting the number of people gaining admission, or they can figure out ways to reduce the high (and often implicit) subsidies to middle and upper income students. (Actually, they have a third choice of providing lower quality education to the same number of students, but I see this as unlikely in most cases.) Goodman provides arguments for reducing subsidies:

Which gives more bang for the buck, deworming or OLPC?

A recent article by Timothy Ogden (Computer Error?) provides a pretty clear answer: forget the glitzy computers, and put your scarce resources into the provision of deworming pills. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program provides computers at around $200 a pop, while deworming pills cost between 50 cents and 4 dollars per student per year. All the control trials of computers in classrooms have given—at best—ambiguous results. But the available studies of deworming pills suggest improvements in student attendance in the range of 20-25 percent. I'm glad to see this argument get some publicity since I've been expressing skepticism of the OLPC program for some time.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but I see an analogy with the growing debate around microfinance. Just as Yunus is receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, more and more studies are casting doubt on the benefits of microlending. (Just to be clear, most of the studies look only at microlending, while microfinance encompasses a wider range of services, e.g. savings, insurance, etc.) So perhaps we need a rule that the more celebrity status a development initiative gets, the more skeptical we should be. 

(Hat tip: Michael Trucano)

Update: Allana Shaikh over at UN Dispatch reiterates the point: "It’s time to call a spade a spade. OLPC was a failure."

A Grameen group for education (and the end of knowledge management for development)?

Yesterday Dave Snowden published on his blog what is currently just an intriguing snippet - the idea of a Grameen group for learning (look forward to him expanding on the concept):

The basic idea is that you get your bursary as a progressive series of payments only if you form a learning group with other people in your community and you all take responsibility for each other group members completion of whatever education programme you take.

Today, Dave followed up with an insight into what "horizontal knowledge transfer" and innovation might mean in a development context:

The World Conference on Higher Education

Paris in July will always serve as an excellent motivator for participants to attend a World Conference. True to form, over 1500 government Ministers, policy makers and academics have gathered this week at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris for the second World Conference on Higher Education. The first took place in 1998 and attracted an even larger crowd and the discussions from that event have provided the point of departure for this year's debates. The conference title is The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research for Societal Change and Development and effectively explores global developments in higher education over the past decade. The discussions are driven by three themes:

• Internationalization, Regionalization and Globalization
• Equity, Access and Quality
• Learning, Research and Innovation

The smart economics of educated women

Editor's Note: Jennifer Yip is a consultant for the World Bank Group's Doing Business team.

At an age when mothers admonish their children to finish their brussels sprouts, my mother issued warnings about the importance of getting a PhD if I wanted to gain the respect of my future husband. Those warnings were followed by the oft-repeated reminder that I should "marry well, so you don’t have to work if you don’t want to."

Twenty years and a couple of degrees later I’ve often wondered how those two pieces of advice go together. What is the point of getting an advanced degree if I eventually decide not to work? 

Thinking the unthinkable in Indian higher education

Greater financial autonomy for Indian universities? I can almost hear an audible gasp. Nevertheless, that's what Santosh Mehrotra, a senior adviser of India's Planning Commission, has recommended in a recent article in International Higher Education:

...The pace of expansion in the new few years may well turn out to be frenetic. The most serious problem that this sudden expansion will entail is finding faculty of appropriate quality in the public higher education system. Therefore, an initiative to be seriously considered involves giving greater financial autonomy to universities, to enable them to mobilize resources from sources other than the government—partly to attract Indian academics teaching abroad back to India. Salaries have risen sharply recently, thanks to the Sixth Pay Commission’s recommendations to make returning home attractive for nonresident Indians. However, the requisite autonomy of universities is also needed to encourage them to attract faculty back to India.

Evaluating the OLPC pilots

Michael Trucano of the World Bank's EduTech blog has posted a valuable round-up of various evaluations of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilots around the world. Michael warns that many of the evaluations are of short-term and small-scale pilots, which limits our ability to extrapolate.

However, the Inter-American Development Bank and others have started evaluations of much larger OLPC implementations, most notably in Peru. But here's another question for the evaluators out there (and one that Michael asks, albeit very nicely, in his post) - can you really get an accurate evaluation of a high-profile project when so many parties have a vested interest in seeing it succeed? Not that there's anything wrong with wanting a project to succeed, but what happens when the next development fad comes around, and the OLPC is no longer the cool new kid on the block? The same question would seem to apply to a whole range of interventions (the Millennium Villages immediately come to mind).    

Doubling down on higher education

China could very possibly be setting a record this year with the largest number of unemployed recent college graduates in the history of the world. A recent article in International Higher Education reports that in 2009 "close to 2 million graduates may not find jobs." The article goes on: "in a job fair held by Donghua University, more than 30,000 graduates competed for 1,700 positions provided by foreign firms." In 1999 the Chinese government embarked on an ambitious expansion of its higher education system - just in time for a huge number of students to graduate into the current depressed job market.

Smackdown of the OLPC smackdown

Last month I wrote a post called OLPC smackdown, for which I received a number of critical comments. The item pointed to an article by Jon Evans in The Walrus Magazine criticizing the One Laptop Per Child program. Commentor Osimod thought the article wasn't even worth discussing: "I was never really convinced by OLPC, but that article is so *superficial* that I don't think it's worth publicizing it." I'll grant that the article was a superficial analysis, although I still think it brought up some valid points. (And I just pointed to the article - you should see the reaction that Jon Evans got!)

But if you're looking for rigorous analysis, I'm glad to oblige. A new working paper on The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education looks at the results of a randomized evaluation of the use of computers in classrooms in Colombia. (I should note that the computers in this particular evaluation were not provided by OLPC, but the evaluation should still tell us something about the utility of computers in the classroom.) The results were underwhelming, to say the least:

Income (in)equality among the professoriate

“Salary progression”—the difference in salary between junior and senior professors—in general appears modest compared to the situation in the professions outside academe. According to our research, for most of the 15 countries in the study, salaries seldom doubled between entry level and senior ranks. The major industrialized countries (including Germany, France, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom) stood at the bottom, in terms of variations between junior and senior ranks, and the developing countries (such as China, South Africa, Argentina, and others) at the top. India ranks poorly on both progression and on basic salary. The lack of possibilities for improved salaries is a problem for the profession in general, but it is particularly damaging for the most productive academics. The latter are the most likely to leave academe or to go to countries with higher salaries.

That is from a new article by Philip Altbach, Director of the Center for International Higher Education, called The Intricacies of Academic Remuneration. Of course, we must take into account the many types of non-income remuneration that academics receive. But still I wonder - what are the chances that the professiorate (or Ministries of Education) would permit the kind of income dispersion that is normally seen in the (purely) private sector? I'm not holding my breath.