Oxford University is currently debating its internal governance. 800-years of being run by an academic cooperative is under threat as modernisers seek to bring in external expertise. Timothy Garton Ash, one such moderniser, uses his Guardian Op-Ed column to push the case for reform. He makes an interesting point about European educational aspirations:
Britain, like France and Germany, spends only 1.1% of its gross domestic product on tertiary education. The US spends 2.6% - 1.4% from private sources and 1.2% from public. In other words, American public expenditure on higher education is more than our public and private expenditure combined. Europe talks the talk of a “knowledge-based economy”; the US walks the walk. And it is being followed aggressively by the upthrusting Asian economies.
What is to be done? One option would be for European taxpayers to pay significantly more for their leading national universities. That is about as likely as the Colosseum moving to Nottingham.
I know just the spot…
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University Education funding should be exclusively public (I mean funded by the state). One other side of the question would be that private universities fund themselves without the least grant from the state.
Education from beginning to end should be the responsibility of the state. Those figures that are given in he opening post are not sufficiently clear, because I presume that even the private universities receive partial funding from the state, in which case the problem is worse.
And it is about time for education to be the same all over the world, without differences between coutries.