Can The Public Money Used to Fund Higher Education?
The spectacular growth of private higher education the world over has been garnering a lot of attention without a doubt. Indeed, private higher education has been a viable entity in the landscape of global higher education. While private universities may have co-existed with the public sector, many private universities have grown into some of the most prestigious higher education establishments in the world.
As more and more students are drawn into private higher education throughout the world, it becomes imperative for governments and stakeholders to consider how privates can and do contribute to meeting their nations’ higher education needs as well as to what extent should governments facilitate such efforts.
Generally, governments fund public higher education through annual appropriations, while privates rely heavily on tuition revenues and philanthropic contributions. Experts note that no attention has been given to why governments use various funding mechanisms to allocate funding to private providers. Policymakers, researchers and academicians continue to debate private higher education’s increasingly important role in an era of scarce financial resources and swelling enrolments.
With the prevalence of private higher education providers becoming the dominant institution type as mass higher education pervades less developed nations, more attention needs to be paid on the effects of such systems, particularly in questioning if there is any relationship between the channels available to publicly fund private higher education and the existing balances of states public or private sectors.
There are five basic characterises in today’s higher education:
1. The Statist Case (pure public case with 90 per cent public enrolments and 90 per cent state funding, characterised by a high degree of ministerial oversight and little institutional autonomy; usually no tuition fees and governments usually provide financial support. Found in many lesser-developed nations in Africa and Latin America as well as in Western Europe).
2. Public-Autonomous (focuses on single-sector systems that are largely publicly funded with a greater reliance on private sources of financing to supplement state appropriations. Nations having such a structure tend to have strong historical ties with the UK).
3. The Homogenised Pattern (represents the most balanced system in terms of both finance and form of control-government perceptions prevail that privates perform useful functions and should be financially supported. Countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and New Zealand fit into this pattern).
4. Minority Private (a dual system is in operation; privates represent between 10-50 per cent of total enrolments and are largely financed by non-government funding. The public sector is still the dominant higher education provider. This is the dominant pattern much across Latin America).
5. Majority Private (often referred to the ‘pure private model’ where privates enrol the majority of students mainly because the government cannot maintain a sizeable public sector instead channelling public funding into primary and secondary education. Examples are Japan, South Korea and the Philippines).
Thus, policymakers need to have an understanding of the relationship between various blends of public or private finance and sector sizes and the availability of channels through which public funding can be allocated to private higher education providers. In the case of Malaysia, this is an issue that need to be tackled head on.
Arguably, with massification of higher education and the mushrooming of private providers, policymakers in Malaysia and many other countries in similar predicament need to put in place intelligent and prudent policies and observe successes in funding mechanisms from more established systems around the globe.
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