Bloom, David E. and Henry Rosovsky (2001) “Higher education and international development” in Current Science, v. 81, no. 3. pages 252-256.
The Task Force on Higher Education and Society – focused on India, as does this article, but it nevertheless has relevance for Kenya and Africa.
In a “knowledge economy” a university degree is increasingly seen as the basic requirement for entry – in much of the globalized world. Higher education can’t be seen any longer as an effort of the elite – it is now a mass pursuit.
p. 253: “Globalization occurs through four principal channels: movements of goods, capital, labor, and ideas. Its potential benefits are huge, but, so far, these benefits have been delivered mainly to the rich world and to East Asia. Globalization increases the ability of rich countries to compete for talented students and faculty and focuses these students’ attention on the opportunities of the North, not the South. Globalization is also making the world economy increasingly competitive and increasingly unforgiving of laggards. The North’s practice of draining, training, and retaining the best brains . . . clearly undermines the South’s ability to compete in business and industry – as well as weakening its chance of building the better government and higher education systems that are essential to it making significant progress on a whole range of development issues.”
Bloom and Rosovsky look at economistic models of educational analysis – World Bank, especially – and the economists’ reliance on “. . . a simplistic and misleading way of assessing the return on investments in higher education.” (p. 253)
Essentially, the authors go after the World Bank and other similar organizations for not incorporating into their analysis any sense that being more educated is, in and of itself, a benefit. That the only measurable benefit of higher education (or maybe, to put it differently, the only measure the WB/IMF crowd WANT to assess is higher earnings.
p. 253: “However, higher education clearly confers benefits above and beyond enhancing the incomes of those who receive degrees. (the same is true of basic and secondary education, though the source and magnitude of the benefits may differ). Many of these benefits take the form of public goods, such as the contribution of higher education to enterprise, leadership, governance, culture and participatory democracy. . . these are all vital building blocks for stronger economies and societies and all routes by which the benefit of investment in higher education multiples throughout the society.”
Markets will never deliver education optimally, because no matter how much energy is focused on the need for training for employment, education also involves longer term efforts, think accumulating and imparting new knowledge, think humanities and basic sciences. Markets are short-term in focus, and will never optimally deliver this kind of new knowledge for unexpected – because unthought-of-as-yet ideas.
Also, markets will optimally deliver education only to that group who can meet the market-adjusted price of education, the price point below which the market chooses no longer to deliver a service that people, by class definition, cannot pay for. Optimal - in market terms – is far from universal.
