Recession Could Push U.S. Further Behind in Educational Goals, Compared With Other Nations
The recent recession could accelerate global shifts in the race to educate more people and produce top-flight research, and, as a result, the United States could lose ground.
That's the conclusion of a new paper by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. John Aubrey Douglass, the paper's author and a senior research fellow at the center, examined the impact of the economic downturn on higher-education budgets in several member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Mr. Douglass found that, outside the United States, most countries have thus far avoided large cuts to college budgets and that, in fact, many nations have used the recession to speed up higher-education reforms. By contrast, some 34 American states have already made major reductions in spending on higher education, in some cases limiting college access.
"Looking over one's shoulder at the rest of the world, there appears to be a different set of national government approaches to funding and supporting higher education during the Great Recession than what we find in the U.S.," Mr. Douglass writes in the paper, "Higher Education Budgets and the Global Recession: Tracking Varied National Responses and Their
