By Ole Henckel (olhe@dpu.dk)

How much is the education? This question is heard more and more frequently from students who are enrolling in European universities. For decades now, students in many European countries have been used to education being available for all regardless of income and background, but in the past year or so more and more students have had to pay a fee for the courses they wish to attend, and they have discovered that free education is no longer a given in the welfare society. The main argument for the introduction of a fee for education is that students who pay for their courses tend to finish them quicker, and that a fee will force students to choose an education that provides a fair chance of gainful employment afterwards. However, the introduction of fees incurs a risk of a drop in the number of applicants; some consider education a luxury they cannot afford.

Sliding away

In Denmark, the departure from universal free education came in 2005 with the introduction of a fee for supplementary preparatory courses. Now, payment is demanded of all non-EU-students; so far, it has been free for students from Asia and elsewhere to enrol in a Danish education, but now they are charged a fee of EUR 10.000 to 30.000 for two years of postgraduate studies to obtain a Master's degree.

The logical next step will be to introduce a fee for Danes who already have a degree of some kind, or maybe a general fee for post-graduate studies, while graduate studies probably will remain exempt. The argument for exemption is that students often lack the necessary insight to choose their university studies 'correctly' in the brief span between ending their secondary and starting their tertiary school. It is probably not unrealistic to expect that student will have gained this insight after three or four years of getting acquainted with the concept of academic studies. As a curious aside, it should be noted that Norway has taken a rather drastic step and simply passed a law that prohibits the introduction of educational fees!

Quality

The gradual introduction of fees in education is a response to the larger issue of funding of universities in Europe. The overall aim is a significant increase in private funding, which is the one area where Europe is far behind Japan and the United States. Therefore, the European Commission has proposed that the reforms that follow from the Bologna process should include strategic plans for future funding.

The arguments for including private funding are based on an outspoken concern at the political level that European universities do not measure up to the competition overseas. One of the key reasons for this is the emergence of mass universities, which the European universities have yet to adapt to: In 1960, a grand total of some 9.000 students were enrolled at the then two Danish universities in Copenhagen and Århus. By 2004, that figure had risen to 110.000 enrolled students in the by now twelve Danish universities. This has caused a massive rise in public expenditure on university students, while at the same time the resources allocated per student has dropped dramatically.

If we consider all Danish universities at once, we find that from 1982 to 1994, the student-teacher ratio (STR) increased by 54%. The actual increase, which has risen further since 1994, is in fact much higher, since the student-teacher ratio is usually calculated from the number of students who sign up for exams, which leaves out all the students who show up for classes and counselling, but who for one reason or another fail to sign up for exam(s).

The change in the STR has fuelled a growing political concern about the quality of our education. The key question is whether or not it is even possible to maintain a certain quality in free education at a time when nearly one in five youths attend a university. The touchy issue of quality is closely connected to a rapidly expanding market for education and to many European nations' ambition to brand themselves as attractive providers of education in the hope of attracting foreign students. To attract the best students, a university must document a high level of quality, but in recent decades, Europe has lost the position as the first choice to the United States, although 9/11 and the American response, which includes more strict rules concerning visa-application, has given Europe a slight advantage in recent years.

Private funding

The most likely outcome at this time is that universities will obtain increased private funding in the future, since the national governments are reluctant to pay the entire bill. If the solution is increased private funding, one could do worse than to look to England, where partial private payment has been in force since 1998. The immediate result was an unforeseen drop in the number of applicants, which is ascribed to the fact that the fee, which many have raised through loans, kept many, and particularly those from the working classes, from enrolling. This means that the first result was the opposite of the desired – a drop in the number of candidates and an increased social gap, a gap the educational system was at least partially designed to lessen.

The British system has now been changed, so that funding is obtainable without the student necessarily having to live with the debts forever after. The method is income-contingent repayment. This repayment does not begin until the candidate finds a job after having finished his or her education. Once the candidate has a job, repayment in the form of a percentage of the income is simply deducted from his or her pay check along with the regular income tax. You do not start repayment until you have a job, and should you become unemployed, your repayment is placed on hold for the duration. This funding resembles a sort of reverse pension, where the individual invests a part of an expected future income. In liberal Great Britain, however, they have the individuality of repayments; the individual is billed the entire cost of his or her education.

We might consider a Scandinavian adaptation of the British model, one where individual repayment is supplemented with some sort of public funding, e.g. in such a way that the amount you have to pay back varies with your income level. Those who land a high-paying job after graduation would earn more from their investment in education and would therefore also have to pay more. The relatively minor pay-rate variation in Denmark means that individual repayment is generally speaking ill suited as a primary mechanism, simply because the income increase you get from taking a university education is significantly lower in Denmark than in many other countries.

We could also increase the collaboration with the customers, the businesses who employ the candidates, whether the income-adjusted repayment is individualised or not. It would probably take generations to establish a tradition for philanthropy akin to the one we are familiar with from the United States. If employers are to pay a proportion of the costs of educating their employees, they will become contributors to the privately funded part of the educational economy straight away, which seems reasonable since education not only benefits the individual candidate. Education is a benefit to the corporate world at large. My proposal would therefore be that we focus our efforts in this area, when the skirmish that is educational economy will develop into full-fledged warfare in the coming years. It would seem pointless to just refuse to take part in the discussion, because that would hardly improve the quality of education – the lack of funding has made it imperative that alternative funding is generated sooner rather than later.

Further reading

For more information about education in Great Britain, Ole Henckel suggests: Barr, Nicholas and Ian Crawford: Financing Higher Education. Answers from the UK. Routledge. New York, (2005)

About Ole Henckel

Ole Henckel is a Ph.D.-student at the Department for Educational Sociology at the Danish University of Education. Ole Henckel is studying European educational policy with a particular emphasis on the Bologna-process, Transnational education and GATS.

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