Paris
Philippe Jollant, fed up with yet another boring lecture, stood up in his poetry class at the Sorbonne, swung his brown cloth bag over his shoulder and stalked out to a sunny cafe in this city’s Latin Quarter.
“The Sorbonne is like an old chateau, a bit sclerotic,” complained Jollant, a twenty-six-year-old modern literature student who’s had enough of stuffy professors pushing the classics inside dull-green classrooms without any high-tech study aids.
Even prestigious universities like the Sorbonne, deeply entrenched in centuries-old academic traditions, may have to get with the times and respond to students like Jollant. A new report on higher education in the industrialized world predicts that colleges and universities will have to make sweeping changes in curricula as the ranks of students swell.
Education, once the domain of a privileged few, is democratizing rapidly, says the report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the official think tank for a tiny clique of upper-crust nations.
The ten-nation report praises some U.S. schools — including colleges and universities in Virginia, as models in adapting to rapid changes. But it says other countries need to rethink postsecondary education to keep Up with advancing technology, accommodate students and fight unemployment with a better-skilled workforce.
Authors of the development organization’s study struggled with the question of who should pick up the tab for the changes that the report recommends. Governments are strapped for cash, business involvement has its limits and, in European countries especially, boosting tuition has triggered student unrest.
“Europe is in a real dilemma here,” Malcolm Skilbeck, the study s chief author and a former university administrator from Australia, said in an interview. He cited the accepted European tenet that “students should have access to knowledge free of charge.”
Among the study’s proposals are deferred payments, loans and work-study programs — measures Europe has yet to widely adopt. But the report, which still needs to be blessed by the development organization’s education committee before its scheduled release this fall, could put more pressure on countries to act.
Growing Numbers and Higher Expectations
Once a “distant goal for a small minority,” higher education could soon reach 80 percent or more of the population, says the study. which examined several European countries, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In some countries, the deluge already has arrived and it is sure to get worse before it gets better as colleges and universities schools scramble to keep pace.
The study predicts “ever higher levels of students at all ages” who will be seeking additional education to adjust to evolving job markets. From 1985 through 1994, enrollment among eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds jumped from 25 percent to 40 percent in Canada and from 19 percent to 33 percent in France, the study says. In the United States, enrollment of twenty-six- to twenty-nine-year-olds rose from 8 percent to nearly 10 percent.
Among the trends are an expansion in off-campus distance education via television or computer, work experience studies, and specialized technical schools that serve regional business needs. The study notes criticism by students and teachers “of policies that suggest institutions are behaving too much like commercial enterprises.”
The report also noted that colleges and universities have begun looking at “the student as the consumer” who “wants marketable skills and expects to acquire them with a minimum of effort, cost and time.”
At more traditional schools, growing demand combined with constrained budgets has resulted in overcrowding and “unevenness in the quality of teaching and learning,” the study says. Without naming names, the report says researchers found “excessive reliance in teaching on impersonal lecturing and insufficient interaction with teachers.”
The study praises schools in Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand. It also singled out community colleges, or “career schools,” in Virginia, where, the study says, students “spoke very highly of the skills and attitudes of their teachers and of the care taken to produce highly motivating learning-centered environments.”
“Adapting to the Needs of the Economy”
An emerging trend in the United States and other countries that are members of the development organization is a two-year degree from a community college or similar institution, then specialization at a trade school.
It’s a matter of “adapting to the needs of the economy,” said Charles Lenth, director of policy studies at the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based think tank. “That implies the need to rethink what degrees look like, whether everyone needs a four-year degree.”
The study cites the need for increased financing to build new campuses equipped with computers and other high-tech equipment. But it says simply raising student fees is not the answer.
“Proposals for fees have provoked strong reactions in France. Germany and the United Kingdom,” it notes.
According to the study, overall spending on higher education amounts to 2.6 percent of economic output in the United States and only 1.1 percent in France and Germany. That’s in part because private payments, including tuition and fees, total 1.2 percent of the U.S. economy and only 0.2 percent in France and Germany.
Jollant, the Sorbonne student, said his architect father earns too much for him to get financial aid. But his tuition is very low anyway — only 557 francs (about 5100) a year.
At twenty-six, Jollant is a typical case of a student who faces little pressure to look for work right away, so he stays in school to avoid France’s job-short economy. Nearly 13 percent of the workforce here is idle.
“I want to go abroad,” Jollant said, but he added that he didn’t know just what he would do.
For the moment, he puts up with his classes but complains about the course content. His main gripe? “There’s almost never anything on the second half of the twentieth century.”
Who Will Pay?
French officials say they are afraid to raise tuition for fear of riling students, who have repeatedly taken to the streets over proposed education reform.
Virtually free education in Europe contrasts sharply with the situation in the United States, where even state schools can be costly. The University of California. for instance, charges out-of-state students $12,000 a year.
But even American educators are constrained in boosting fees. In New York, an effort to raise the state university’s annual tuition by $400 to a total of $3,800 has drawn fierce opposition.
France’s government has not kept up with college capacity, and students complain of overcrowding and ill-equipped classrooms.
“Education has exploded in the last ten years,” said Michele Gendreau-Massaloux, superintendent of the Paris university system. “We saw a near-doubling of the student population.”
In the United States, President Clinton declared in February that at least two years of college would be “as universal in America by the twenty-first century as high school education is today.” But how realistic that is is open to debate, what with members of Congress lining up in opposition to his tuition- and tax-credit plan.
Additionally, federal and state governments face strong public pressure to hold down spending.
But Skilbeck, the development organization’s researcher, warns that failing to widen educational opportunity will not only aggravate unemployment but cause “an emerging dimension of inequality in our societies. Many people will feel they didn’t get a fair chance.”
COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
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