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Advocate Online
In the Know
Higher Education For Sale
Issues surrounding the globalization of higher education take on new urgency as U.S. negotiators at the GATS talks push to include higher ed in trade agreements.
NEA higher education leaders have become increasingly concerned about the potential impact of General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) expansion into the field of education, especially higher education.
GATS is a multilateral agreement, adopted in 1994, that covers a broad range of government measures that affect trade in services. And under GATS, education is considered a service to be traded. In the current round of trade negotiations, there is pressure from the industrialized nations, most prominently, the United States, Australia, and Japan, to make it easier to trade education, especially higher education, across national borders.
Negotiators for the United States maintain that an agreement would only impact private institutions, those most interested in expanding into international markets. These, for the most part, U.S.-based, for-profit institutions argue that the agreement would help eliminate national policies holding back international education.
But NEA and Education International, the international organization of education unions, fear such an agreement would promote the privatization and commercialization of higher education. Both organizations argue that a trade agreement is not necessary because private institutions and cross border education can flourish within the current education arena. The main stumbling block to the growth in private and for-profit higher education internationally, according to NEA higher education director Ann Shadwick, is a concern about quality.
"GATS critics see the role of higher education differently," notes Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Education at Boston College. "Higher education is seen as more than a commodity—it is part of the cultural patrimony and the research infrastructure of a society and is therefore a public good."
When the GATS was first implemented in 1995, some developing countries made commitments to opening up trade in education services, granting foreign providers almost unfettered access to local markets. Other developing countries, including South Africa and Brazil, oppose including education in a GATS agreement. These countries, Altbach says, see education as a central element in nation building.
To read more about the impact of GATS in higher education, visit Education International, www.ei-ie.org.
| From The Lectern |
That the academy also harbors most of whatever passes for an oppositional culture in this country only compounds its troubles and growing unpopularity in many circles. There is a connection here between the recent political attacks on the nation’s faculties and the growing litany of more general complaints about the academic community’s higher tuitions, supposed lack of accountability, grade inflation, plagiarism scandals, and wasteful operations. Both the political attacks and the litany of complaints weaken the public’s support for higher education. It is by no means the case that the American people have bought into the right-wing scenario about the nation’s faculties. But they are not hearing much from the other side. If we are to turn back the attack on the university, we need to make a more effective case for the value of what we do.
—Ellen Schrecker, Thought & Action, The NEA Higher Education Journal, Fall 2005. |
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