The Past Speaks

The OECD reports that:

Out of 32 developed countries, Canada had the second-highest rate of education spending in proportion to its GDP at more than 2.5%, trailing only the United States. A high proportion of that spending, 43.4 per cent in 2007, came from private sources, primarily tuition fees.

See here and here.

Sadly, the OECD did not give a detailed breakdown on whether the money is well spent. It is common knowledge that the US spends a higher proportion of GDP on health care than Canada and gets worse outcomes, at least in terms of life expectancy and cancer mortality. It is common knowledge that the US does almost twice as many C-sections per capita as Canada. Stats of this sort allow us to evaluate these two health care systems.

Applying the same sort of analysis to the university sector would involve looking at cost per student relative to GDP. Much of the money in US higher education is spent on frills like landscaping and sports teams. Ireland has zero tuition fees for EU students but it accomplished it by being ruthless in cutting out such unnecessary expenditure and by restricting postsecondary education to the brighter half of the youth cohort. Irish academics who visit the US notice that the campuses have lots of fountains, stadiums, mascots (!), and other wasteful crap.

Commenting on the same OECD report, the Irish Times reports that education spending in Ireland was among the lowest in the OECD, even at the height of that country’s boom.  See here. In another article, the paper reports that in 2007 “Ireland spent only 1.2 per cent of GDP on higher education, well below the OECD average.” See here. The funny thing is: the participation rates in post-secondary education is high, academic salaries are internationally competitive, and tuition is free.

The world university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)/THES, which take such factors as teacher-student ratios into account, show that Trinity College Dublin is a pretty good institution (52nd in the world), while UCD is 114 (still not too bad).

So why can the Irish can do so much with so little?  Methinks that university administrators need to get their asses on a plan to Dublin. Better yet, they should call Dublin on Skype and figure out what the Irish are doing right.

I admit that some of the money the US ploughs into higher education brings a big return for society. Look at all the start-ups near the Stanford campus. But much of it is wasted. My hunch is that the average American student would be better off under the Irish model.

The New York Times recently carried an article about the various proposals that have been made to restructure higher education in that country. The provocative title is “The End of Tenure” but the solutions proposed go far beyond that. This is my favourite sentence:

And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic ­facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but we can start by getting rid of all of the mascots at North American universities.

Check out this piece, The Academic Athletics Trade-Off.