Challenges of Financial Austerity: Imperatives and Limitations of Revenue Diversification in Higher Education

Abstract

This article is drawn from a paper presented as the Lee Hysan Lecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in May of 2001, and is drawn also from the Project monograph, “Response to Austerity: The Imperatives and Limitations of Revenue Diversification in Higher Education.” The special issue of the Welsh Journal of Education was edited by Maureen Woodhall, one of the foremost scholars of international comparative higher education finance and a specialist on student loan programs. The special issue is one of the best compilations of papers on the topic of cost-sharing in its international perspective, with articles from Woodhall, Johnstone, Roy Jackson from South Africa, Bruce Chapman from Australia, and Adrian Ziderman from Israel. The chapter by Johnstone presents the standard case for revenue diversification, focusing on the limitations of public revenue, particularly in developing and transitional countries, and describes the problems wrought by the pervasive and increasing austerity in higher education. Johnstone presents the various forms of revenue diversification, including the beginning of tuition fees where none has existed, the sharp rise in tuition fees where public sector tuition has already been established, and other forms of shifting a portion of the higher educational cost burden onto parents and students. The principal theme of the paper, however, is to acknowledge some of the limitations on revenue diversification, beginning with the difficulties in the determination and verification of parental income, the challenge to the very notion of student dependence on parental support, and the serious limitations on student cost sharing, including the limited opportunities, in many countries and regions, for part-time employment, and more seriously, the limitations on student loan programs. The paper points to the need for effective cost recovery on student loans, including repayment compliance, an efficient system for collections (which may or may not be attached to the governments tax withholding and pension contribution system), and the need for repayment guarantees, which might appropriately include parents and other members of the family, but which the paper concludes need an ultimate governmental guarantee for those without access to credit worthy co-signatories. The paper also presents some limitations on faculty and institutional entrepreneurship as well as limitations on philanthropy as an alternative to governmental revenue.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.