| US: Decline of a once-great system | |
 It may be that higher education is in greater demand during economic downturns but - after years of insidious cutbacks - American public institutions are struggling to maintain their traditionally high standards. Indeed, the Great Recession seems poised to wreak lasting damage on one of the most successful models of higher education in the world.Higher Education Budgets and the Global Recession, a report published by the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education last month, outlines the discouraging picture. The report's author and a senior research fellow, John Aubrey Douglass, gives a global overview and explores - in particular - the situation in the union's wealthiest and most populous state, California. The report notes that, while other OECD nations are actually using the recession as an excuse to improve the quality of output in the post-secondary sector and to promote innovation, the US is witnessing uncoordinated cuts in funding at the state level. This is inevitable given the decentralised structure of higher education where colleges and universities must rely on financially-strapped state legislatures for much of their money. And more than 75% of all higher education students in the US attend publicly-funded institutions. Explains Douglass: "In short, how state budgets go, so goes US higher education; whereas [for] most national systems of higher education, financing is tied to national budgets with an ability to borrow." According to the report, 34 states have already been forced to make draconian cuts to spending on their colleges and universities, imposin |
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