Enhancing the quality
of higher education:
governance and
funding challenges
Stéphan VINCENT-LANCRIN
OECD
Centre for Educational Research
and Innovation (CERI)
Outline
• Tertiary education and economic
performance
• Enhancing the quality of:
– Teaching
– Research
• Funding and governance implications
Tertiary education and
economic performance
• Labour productivity
• Innovation in the
economy
– Researchers and R&D
– Absorption of
innovation
• Lifelong learning
– Absorption of
innovation
New demands of the modern
economy
• Technology-bias towards highly skilled
people
• Increasing need for non-routine cognitive
skills in advanced economies
– Interactive
– analytical
Mean task input as percentiles of the 1960 task distribution
How the demand for skills has changed
Economy-wide measures of routine and non-routine task input (US)
Routine manual
65
60
Nonroutine manual
55
Routine cognitive
50
Nonroutine analytic
45
40
1960
1970
1980
Source: Levy and Murnane
1990
2002
Nonroutine interactive
Missions of higher education
• Teaching
• Research
• Community services
•
•
•
•
Production of new knowledge
Transmission of knowledge
Transmission of critical thinking
Maintaining of old knowledge (culture,
scholarship, libraries)
EDUCATION / TEACHING
EU countries tend to invest less than OECD
average as a % of GDP (2004)
The US and Korea invest about twice as much in
education per se as most EU countries (% GDP)
(2004)
Annual expenditures per student on tertiary
education (Constant US dollars, PPPs)
100
133
137
120
122
112
112
112
111
139
139
125
114
141
146
147
140
126
115
120
138
140
170
163
167
158
160
174
180
167
200
182
220
202
244
Change in expenditures on tertiary
education (1995-2003)
240
Household contribution to tertiary education
expenditures (2003)
70%
60%
57%
60%
50%
39%
37%
35%
30%31%
40%
30%
20%
10%
3% 3% 4%
0% 0% 0%
0%
5% 5% 6% 6%
23%
19%19%19%
17%
14%
11%11%12%
7% 8% 9%
The expansion in numbers may continue and put
pressure on quality: projected tertiary enrolments in
2025 under recent trends (2005=100)
Source: OECD, Higher Education 2030, Vol. 1 Demography (forthcoming)
How much additional public budget (% of GDP) will
be needed to keep current “quality” conditions in
2025
(scenario 2, no productivity enhancement, current cost-sharing)
Evolution of student/staff ratio according to recent
trends in access (if staff stay at 2004 level)
Changes in the number of 25-44 tertiary graduates
relative to the US
Tertiary Educational Attainment
of the 25-44 population
2005 and 2025 (trends of past 10 years)
Quality of education
• Teaching is the first and main function of
Higher Education
• BUT little incentives for teaching: bad
teaching is often unnoticed, and good
teaching, unrewarded
Quality of education
• Change the incentive structures
– Reward and value good teaching as much as research
– Assessment of tertiary education learning outcomes
• Differentiated tertiary education sector
– Avoid academic drift
• Develop soft skills during first years of university
– Implies better student/staff ratio for the undergraduate years
(funding)
– New pedagogies and productivity enhancements (e-learning?)
• Internationalisation
– Encourage outward and inward student mobility
Quality of education
• Autonomy and accountability
– Lift administrative burdens of public accountancy
– Autonomy to hire and to some extent set wages
• Quality assurance mechanisms
– Risks: costly and burdensome
– Objective: should develop quality culture
• Performance-based funding
– Important to have agreed targets
– Mix of input- and output-based funding works well
• Importance of lifelong learning
– Not necessarily in tertiary education
– Examples: community colleges in the US
RESEARCH
Share of students enrolled in advanced research
programmes (ISCED 6) (2005)
Research
« Public » research expenditures as a
percentage of GDP (2005)
Lisbon agenda target
Number of (ISI) articles per million inhabitant
Scientific articles per million inhabitants
Relative public research productivity
Public research as % of GDP
Scientific articles per million inhabitants
Relative public research productivity
Public research as % of GDP
Quality of research
• Concentrate the funding?
– A question of balance: project-based funding and
block grants
– Avoid short term funding and « research to the
assessment »
• Relocate the excellent research?
– World class universities, mergers, centres of
excellence
– To be balanced against regional innovation
• Avoid academic drift
CONCLUSIONS
Conclusion
• Research is important, but education even more so
• Funding is important: level and type of allocation
–
–
–
–
More funding for tertiary education(new cost sharing?)
Balance in funding mechanisms, based on inputs and outputs
In research, be ready to « lose » money
Competing with Harvard will be difficult…
• But quality is not just about money
– Education: innovation in teaching, focus on graduation and not just
entry
– Research: be ready to lose and waste money by funding controversial
research and researchers
• Internationalisation contributes to quality enhancement
Stephan.Vincent-Lancrin@oecd.org
THANK YOU
www.oecd.org/edu/universityfutures