The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 13th, 2015
By Karin Fischer
In proposing to make community college free for millions of Americans, President Obama would buck global trends.
Over the last two decades, almost every country that has taken up tuition policy has moved to charge fees, not to rescind them. Most notably, universities in Britain, which were free until the late 1990s, have nearly tripled their tuition fees in recent years.
“Most of the globe is moving toward, not away, from tuition,” says D. Bruce Johnstone, a professor emeritus at the State University of New York’s University at Buffalo and an expert in comparative higher education.
The result is a bipolar world, split between countries that expect students to cover at least some of the cost of their education and those that believe that a college degree should be paid from national coffers. Put another way, it is a divide between societies that see higher education as a mostly private benefit and those that view it as a public good.
While their number is shrinking, in the countries without tuition, the notion of free higher education often resonates strongly with citizens, suggesting that Mr. Obama’s proposal could also find popular backing in the United States.
Take Germany. After a constitutional court in that country ruled in 2005 that universities could charge tuition, about one-third of German states, which have primary oversight of higher-education institutions there, adopted modest fees, typically about 1,000 euros, or about $1,200. But in the decade since, each and every state has moved to roll back tuition.
The reversal was the result of political pressure, says Rolf Hoffman, executive director of the German-American Fulbright Commission. “Germans would sooner pay for kindergarten—and they do—than pay for university,” Mr. Hoffman says. “They feel very strongly that it’s an unalienable right to have access to higher education.”
Nina Lemmens, who heads the German Academic Exchange Service’s New York office, says the attitude toward higher education in Germany is different than that in the United States, where students and families have been asked to shoulder an increasingly larger burden of paying for a college degree. In Germany, covering the cost of education is seen as “an investment in the people,” she says, “and for the good of the whole society.”
An Inverted System
Germany isn’t alone. Austria, too, imposed, then abolished, tuition, despite threats to public financing there. Mexico “almost had a revolution” over moderate tuition increases at its public universities a decade ago, says Philip G. Altbach, research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.
Denied tuition revenue, Mexican universities have been unable to grow, leaving many students to turn to private institutions.
Indeed, offering higher-education programs at no cost sometimes leads to situations in which problems like social inequality are actually exacerbated by the fees policy rather than ameliorated.
In Brazil, where public universities remain free, 75 percent of students attend private colleges. Spots at the country’s public institutions are highly competitive, creating an “inversion in the higher-education system,” says Marcelo Knobel, a professor and former dean of undergraduate education at the University of Campinas. Students from wealthier backgrounds tend to score better on university-entrance examinations. Thus, the students “who can get in are those who could afford to pay,” he says.
A new affirmative-action policy, to be rolled out over the next several years, will set aside more seats at Brazilian universities for minority and low-income students and those who attended public high schools.
Globally, there’s little evidence that low or no tuition guarantees broader access to a college education—the stated goal of Mr. Obama’s plan. Indeed, a 2005 comparative study of 15 countries found that access to higher education was not necessarily directly linked to the affordability of a college degree. And some of the countries with the fastest-growing college-going rates today are in Asia, where students and families generally foot the bill.
“Access is as much related to capacity and to the lack of quality options as to price,” says Alex Usher, a Canadian higher-education consultant and the study’s author. Countries with high tuition but generous student-loan programs may also have higher university-enrollment rates than those without tuition, a second report, published in 2012 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, concluded.
Still, Mr. Usher cautions that the distinctiveness of the American higher-education system (few nations have anything similar to community colleges, for example) and of the president’s proposal (specifically aimed at institutions that enroll the lowest-income students) may make it hard to draw inferences from other countries’ experience.
Even so, observers of Mr. Obama’s plan may want to keep their eye on one other country, Chile. After sometimes-violent student protests, that nation’s president, Michelle Bachelet, made free tuition a major plank of her 2013 re-election campaign.
Like the American proposal, however, its enactment is far from certain.
