Cost Sharing in Higher Education: Tuition, Financial Assistance,
and Accessibility in a Comparative Perspective
D. BRUCE JOHNSTONE*
形容词State University of New York at Buffalo
Abstract:Cost sharing in higher education is the assumption by parents and students of a portion of the costs of higher education – costs that in many na-tions, at least until recently, have been borne predominantly or even exclusively by governments, or taxpayers. The author prents empirical evidence of, and various theoretical justifications for, increasing cost sharing throughout the world in the forms of tuitions and fees, the diminishing real value of student maintenance grants, and an increasing reliance on private forms of higher education. Resistance to cost sharing, both ideological and strategic, is also analyd. The author discuss policy alternatives such as grants versus loans and the criteria for an appropriate tuition level, as well as the impact of cost shar-ing on enrolment behaviour. He concludes that incread cost sharing is proba-bly inevitable, less on the basis of the classical neoliberal economic claim for greater equity and efficiency than on the basis of the sheer need for revenue and the increasing priority of alternative claims on public treasuries.
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Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2003, Vol. 39, No. 3: 351–374
Cost sharing in higher education refers to a shift in the burden of higher education costs from being borne exclusively or predominately by government, or taxpayers,to being shared with parents and students. This cost sharing, as articulated in Johnstone [1986, 1992, 1993b, 2002, 2003], may take the form of tuition, either be-ing introduced where it did not hitherto exist or being rapidly incread where it al-ready did, or of public institutions charging more nearly break-even, or full, cost fees for room, board, books, and other costs of student living that may formerly have been covered mainly by the government. A shift of the cost burden from the gov-ernment to student and family may also come in the form of a reduction or even a freezing (especially in inflationary times) of student grants. Similarly, it may come in the form of a reduction of the effective grants reprented by student loan subsidies,351
**Preeti Schroff Mehta and Pamela Marcucci helped immeasurably in compiling the country data for this paper. An earlier version of this paper, by Johnstone and Schroff-Mehta, will ap-pear as “Higher Education Finance and Accessibility: An International Comparative Examina-tion of Tuition and Finance Assistance Policies”, in Globalization and Reform in Higher Education ,edited by Heather Eggins. London: Society for Rearch into Higher Education, 2003.
**Direct all correspondence to: Prof. D. Bruce Johnstone, 428 Baldy Hall, University at Buffalo, Buffalo NY, USA, 14260; e-mail: dbj@buffalo.edu © Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague 2003
as interest rates are incread to become clor to the costs of money or market rates. Finally, the shift may come about through public policies that shift enrol-ments, particularly in rapidly expanding systems, from a heavily subsidid public ctor to a much less subsidid, tuition-dependent private ctor.1
rveIn all the ways, and in combinations thereof, albeit unevenly and still ideo-logically contested, the burden of higher educational costs worldwide is being shift-ed from governments or taxpayers to students and families.2Thus, we can obrve cost sharing entering into the public policies of countries with totally different so-cial-political-economic systems and at totally different stages in their expansion of higher educational participation: e.g. China, Vietnam, the UK and Austria.
In light of this shift, this article explores five questions:
诱惑是什么意思1.What are the theoretical and practical rationales for shifting some portion of the higher educational cost burden from governments and taxpayers to students and families?
2.What are the theoretical, political, ideological, practical, and/or strategic bas for resistance to this shift?
3.What is the impact of increasing cost burdens (mainly tuition and related fees) on student enrolment behaviour – that is, enrolment, persistence to a degree,continuation to a higher degree, and the decision of where or in what kind of high-er educational institution to enrol? (In this connection, we will be particularly inter-ested in whether enrolments might be dampened for tho who access is already compromid by (a) low income; (b) racial, ethnic, religious, or linguistic status; (c)gender (most often ‘being female’); or (d) isolation – especially from good condary schools and the cultural enrichment generally associated with urban areas, as well as from institutions of higher education clo enough to allow living at home).
4.What is the higher education cost (or more properly expenditure ) burden cur-rently being borne by the student and family in various countries, and what is the recent increa in the costs borne by students and families as oppod to govern-ments or taxpayers? (This question must consider any offtting effects of means-tested or otherwi targeted grants and student loans).
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5.What policy tools – e.g. need-bad grants, loans, loan subsidies, very low or no tuition, subsidi
d lodging and food – are being employed to increa acces-sibility, and what is known of their efficacy?
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美女与野兽动画片中文Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2003, Vol. 39, No. 3352
1
For an extensive collection of papers and studies on cost sharing, e International Com-parative Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project : buffalo.edu/org/Int HigherEdFinance.
2‘Taxpayers’ includes the general citizen/consumer losing purchasing power to the govern-ment via the higher prices brought on by hidden business taxes or through inflation brought about by public deficit financing.
Rationale for cost sharing
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The principal caus for or rationales behind this shift are three, and they differ con-siderably in their underlying economic, political, and ideological assumptions. The first rationale is the sheer need for other than governmental revenue. This need be-gins with the dramatic increa in most countries in
both the public and private de-mand for higher education, recognid as a major engine of national economic growth and a provider of individual opportunity and prosperity. This demand pres-sure is a function of the sheer demographic increa in the traditional college-age cohort, compounded by the increasing condary school completion rates, which in turn increas the number of tho wanting to go on to higher education, further compounded by an expansion of what may be considered a college-going age cohort to include adults formerly by-pasd by the system. This demand pressure is espe-cially felt in low income countries that are still trying to change from ‘elite’ to ‘mass’tertiary-level participation, at the same time as they are trying to become more eco-nomically competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the increa in de-mand for higher education can also be found in countries already at mass or even near-universal participation rates, as the average student ‘consumes’ ever increasing amounts of higher or (at least post-condary) education over his or her lifetime.
effectivenessHowever, the institutions delivering higher education are nearly everywhere –and especially in most developing or low-income countries and in tho countries in transition from command to market-driven economies – also suffering from a vere and worning austerity. This austerity is a function of at least three forces. The first is the demand pressure, mentioned just above. The cond is the hi
gh – and likely to increa – per-student costs on top of the increasing numbers of students.3Per-student costs in higher education generally ri faster than unit costs in the general economy owing to the traditional resistance on the part of academia (institutions and faculty alike) to measures that would increa productivity by substituting cap-ital for labour or by shedding existing, but lower priority, programmes and their as-sociated labour costs.4
D. Bruce Johnstone: Cost Sharing in Higher Education: Tuition, Financial Assistance, and Accessibility 353
3
Specifying (not to mention making international comparisons between) per-student, first-degree, instructional costs is oftentimes unreliable for veral reasons including: (1) the dif-ficulty of attributing costs to first degree instruction as oppod, say, to the costs of rearch or rvice or advanced instruction; (2) great variability in the accounting treatment of pen-sion and other so-called benefits expens, in addition to direct salary costs; and (3) a simi-lar variability in the treatment of capital costs within most of the published international da-ta on the comparative costs of higher education.
4The resistance to productivity or efficiency is pervasive in the classical university in most countries, although a kind of ‘efficiency’ is being forced upon many universities in the forms of mandatory enrolment increas, cuts in faculty numbers, and freezes or even reductions in faculty salaries. The more purpoful enhancement to higher educational productivity –e.g. through the application of instructional technology, or the radical restructuring of in-structional styles and faculty workloads – are more likely in entirely new institutions and c-tors (such as ‘distance learning universities’), but it may be debated whether the forms are genuinely ‘more productive’ or are better described as ‘different albeit cheaper’.
布莱尔 邓文迪Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2003, Vol. 39, No. 3
A third cau of incread austerity, especially in the low income and ‘transi-tional’ countries, is the decline in available public (taxpayer-bad) revenue. This de-cline, in turn, may be a function either (or both) of an incread difficulty of taxa-tion, or of competition from other, oftentimes more politically compelling, public needs. For example, taxes were relatively easy to collect in centrally controlled economies such as the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the collap of communism, where purchasing power could be siphoned off at each level of the state-owned production process via ‘turnover’, or other forms of value-added tax-es. The state could also contr
ol – and thus tax – all international trade. Privatisation and globalisation have esntially eliminated the largely invisible and easy-to-col-lect taxes, and the alternatives – e.g. taxes on income, retail sales, property, and the sales of luxury goods – are visible, unpopular, expensive, relatively easy to avoid, and technically (in addition to politically) difficult to collect. Furthermore, for the limited taxes that can be collected (or the limited deficit financing that the economy can tolerate), higher education increasingly has a lower priority than other public ctor needs such as elementary and condary education, public health, housing and public infrastructure, welfare and the social and economic ‘safety net’, and in-ternal and external curity.
It is in light of the forces and the conquent financial struggles that na-tional systems of higher education and institutions nearly everywhere in the world are having to supplement their governmental revenues, not only with ‘cost sharing’, as noted above, but also with entrepreneurial activities such as the sale of faculty rvices, the sale or lea of university facilities, the vigorous pursuit of grants and contracts, and fund raising from alumni, corporations, and friends. Thus, tuition and other fees from students and families have the potential for substantially aug-menting the increasingly scarce public revenues. Tuition also has the advantage of doing so without simultaneously adding new costs or diverting faculty from their core teaching responsibilities (as is th
e ca with supplementing revenues via grants and contracts or other forms of faculty entrepreneurship).
The objection that imposing tuition or increasing it at a rapid rate might ex-clude potential students from poor or rural or otherwi disadvantaged families can be met, it is argued, by the promi of generally available loans (i.e. loans that do not depend on the creditworthiness – and thus the financial worth – of the family), or by means-tested student grants, paid for, at least in part, by the augmented tuition revenue. In fact, the proponents of cost sharing are likely to argue that the alternative to some form of substantial public revenue supplementation is contin-ued or worning austerity in the public higher education system, the likely result of which would be limitations on enrolment and/or increasingly shabby and under-funded universities. And becau the sons and daughters of the wealthy will always have alternatives (in the private ctor or higher education abroad), the students, or potential students, who will be hurt most are the very disadvantaged students that the resistance to tuition is suppod to protect.
The cond rationale for tuition and other forms of cost sharing, bad less on 354
need or expediency than on principle (however ideologically contested), is the no-tion of equity: the v
iew that tho who benefit should at least share in the costs. The principle is made more vivid and compelling by four obrvations. The first is that ‘free’ higher education is actually paid for by all citizens, whether or not they know that they have been taxed (or have had their purchasing power effectively confis-cated by inflation brought on by the printing of money). Second, most taxes – pub-lic policies to the contrary notwithstanding – are collected through regressive, or at best proportional, taxes on sales, production, or individual incomes that cannot be otherwi hidden (or through the even more regressive governmentally-induced in-flation, as mentioned above). Third, a very disproportionate number of the benefi-ciaries of higher education are from middle, upper middle, and upper income fam-ilies who could and would pay at least a portion of the costs of instruction if they had to – thus demonstrating the value to them of the higher educational opportuni-ty and signalling the benefits that are thought to be private as oppod to public.Such students and families would probably prefer that much or all of this particu-lar benefit be paid for by the general taxpayer. But whether higher education is sub-sidid or not – that is, whether tuition is zero, moderate, or high – should make lit-tle or no difference in the enrolment behaviour of the students from more affluent families. In this instance, the higher public subsidy required by low or no tuition can be said (at least by the proponents of ‘cost sharing’) to remble a transfer payment from the public treasury to middle and upper middle class families. Fourth and fi-nally, to the extent that there are potential stud
ents who would be excluded from higher education by the prence of tuition, a portion of the tuition collected can easily (at least in theory) fund the means-tested grants and loan subsidies that can (again, at least in theory) maintain and even enhance accessibility.5
A third rationale for cost sharing in higher education is the neoliberal econom-ic notion that tuition – a price, as it were, on a valuable and highly demanded com-modity – brings to higher education some of the virtues of the market. The first such virtue is the presumption of greater efficiency: that the payment of some tuition will make students and families more discerning consumers and the universities more cost-conscious providers. The cond virtue attributed to the market is producer re-sponsiveness: the assumption that the need to supplement public revenue with tu-ition, gifts, and grants will make universities more responsive to individual and so-cietal needs. A variation on this theme is directed at the alleged problem of academ-D. Bruce Johnstone: Cost Sharing in Higher Education: Tuition, Financial Assistance, and Accessibility 3555Some classic expositions of this equity argument include W. L. Hann and B. A. Weisbrod,Benefits, Costs, and Finance of Higher Education (Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1969); Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay?(New York: the McGraw Hill Book Co., 1973); J. P. Jallade, “Financing Higher Education:The Equity Aspects,” Comparative Education
Review , June 1978, pp. 309–325; and G. Psacha-ropoulos and M. Woodhall, Education for Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The World Bank, 1985); and J. C. Hearn, C. P. Griswold, and G. M. Marine, ‘Region, Resources,and Reason: A Contextual Analysis of State Tuition and Student Aid Policies’, Rearch in Higher Education , 37 (3), pp. 241–278.
