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Private institutions play larger role in US education
By 21ST
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Like many other countries China is today pondering the incredible growth of private higher education.
Historically, the USA stood out simply because it had ample private higher education, while most of the world, including China in the 1950s-70s, ran higher education as a public enterprise. In contrast, from its beginning until 1950, US higher education was more private than public. But today private higher education is common internationally.
The US is no longer a leader because of the proportion of its private institutions, though most of its institutions are private.
Japan and several other Asian countries have over 70 per cent private enrollment. US private higher education leads less by numbers than by forms that others try to establish. The US private institutional mix is unusual and complex. This fits the country's political, economic, and cultural characteristics of decentralization, choice, diversity, and market competition.
No national law establishes one dominant higher education pattern.
The best known US private type are the elite research universities, such as Harvard. In fact, such universities account for a small minority of the total number of institutions but for a large proportion of the country's top institutions as well as research and graduate teaching.
Many more US private institutions pursue success in other ways, offering various choices. Except for elite "liberal arts colleges,'' they are not usually very prestigious but give people freedom to select the size, learning environment, social mix, religious orientation, or other features that suit them.
Much of the world increasingly experiments with some such institutions. (来源：英语学习门户网站EnglishCN.com)
Yet the great majority of the world's private higher education institutions are commercial places resembling businesses. They give access, especially, as in China, where public institutions are difficult to enter. Diverse new places arise from individual initiative.
Other places are heavily job-market oriented. Epitomizing this commercial trend is for-profit higher education.
For-profits constitute roughly a fifth of US degree-granting institutions and double the proportion of institutions overall, mostly (as in China) short-cycle. In much of the world, as in China, the line between for-profit and non-profit is unclear.
The US has long allowed for-profit higher education and has seen remarkable growth in new forms, including "supersystems'' with multiple sites and enormous reach. Cost-conscious new privates worldwide can use such systems for novel ways to hire faculty, develop curriculum, and so forth.
US private (and public) higher education also plays a role in globalization. It opens branch campuses abroad or provides curriculum and methods. For-profit supersystems buy up foreign institutions and add them to their network. All of this fits US patterns in many areas of political and economic globalization.
By Daniel C. Levy, SPECIAL TO 21ST CENTURY
The author is Distinguished Professor, State University of New York at Albany and director of the Programme for Research on Private Higher Education |
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