UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education Volume 3, Issue 1 - Fall 1999 D. Bruce Johnstone, professor of higher and comparative education, was a member of the World Bank Team to the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education held in Paris in October of this year. A Bank paper, "A Survey of Higher Education Finance an Management Reforms," was prepared by Johnstone, with the assistance of Alka Arora, a UB student in Comparative Education who spent the summer interning at the World Bank, and William Experton, a higher education specialist with the Bank. The bank paper was distributed at the Conference and had widespread-and not always politically favorable-attention. This conference, the first ever of its kind, brought together more than 4,000 higher educational leaders, faculty, students, scholars and policy analysts of higher education, leaders of educationally-oriented NGOs, and ministers and other government officials in charge of higher education from 115 countries. The official US delegation was headed by David Longanecker, Assistant US Secretary for Postsecondary Education, and Stanley Ikenberry, President of the American Council on Education. Other official U.S. delegates included Jim Applebury, President of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities; Peter McGrath, President of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges; Madeleine Green, ACE International Vice President; and Margaret Miller, President of the American Association for Higher Education. One focus of the Conference was a 12-page draft document, "Declaration on Higher Education for the 21st Century: Vision and Action." Much interest centered on the thorny issue of tuition and the question of who – as among taxpayers, parents, students, businesses, and /or philanthropists – should bear what portion of the cost of higher education. As desperately as tuition might be needed (in light of the inadequacy of public revenues in most countries), and as inequitable as "free" higher education might be (partaken of mainly by the children of the wealthy and paid for by the average taxpayer), the notion of tuition – students and their parents paying a share of the costs—is terribly threatening in many countries. The final draft of the Conference document stepped carefully around the issue of tuition, acknowledging that people should enjoy "the right to higher education based on individual merit, "but providing no direction on how this higher education might—or even should—be paid for. Return to the International and Comparative Studies in Education Homepage |
