 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's host, I'm its creator, I'm its chief cat herder, and for the next hour I'll be your guide to our conversation. We have a fantastic guest talking about very very important data this week. Since the beginning of the Future Trends Forum we have been focused on information and data about the current state of higher education, its history, and what that tells us about its likely future. Now Alex Usher has been doing great work in this field and I've been thinking of him as kind of a hidden treasure in worldwide higher education. Alex is the president of Higher Education Strategy Associates up in Canada. He runs a blog slash newsletter called One Thought to Start Your Day which is by far some of the most intelligent, most charming, and funny look at where higher education is right now. He does fantastic work and he's going to join us to talk about a new project that nobody else has really seen yet that looks at global higher education with its cutting-edge data. Now with all that may bring him up on stage. Alex, welcome. How are you? I'm fantastic. Good to see you. Good to see you. Where have we found you today? This is HESA Towers. You are in HESA Towers, yeah, which is in the Garment District in Toronto, not too far from the Skydome, and yeah, this is where the 13 of us make our home, and it's where I'm coming from. You're coming from the library, right? So we have the library, the conservatory, the hall, the billiard room. Naturally it's a conservatory. That's right, that's right. Well, we're really grateful to you for joining us today. Listen, I just introduced you as a Shameless fan, but our tradition in the forum is to ask people to introduce themselves by talking about what they're going to be working on for the next year. I'm curious, what are the big projects and what are the big topics that are going to be top of mind for you? So let me tell you about two projects, and the first one is the one that you were alluding to in the run-in, and that was what we call World Higher Education, institutions, students, and finances. Maybe I've sent you a couple of slides here. Maybe we could just show people a little, get a sense of what this is about. So I've sat around for years thinking, why do international higher education comparisons have to be so terrible? Why does the data have to be so noncomparable and difficult? And obviously there's practical reasons because of the way the governments collect it. But the basic problem that we saw was that we had a system where you had UNESCO that collects data around the world, but it collects very little data. And you have OECD, which collects better data, not great, but better, but for a more limited set of countries. And what we said was, well, why can't we make a bigger OECD and expend it over the, you know, all of UNESCO? And really we decided we just couldn't do it because there's too many countries. But we realized that if you limited it to about 56 countries, and that's the number we eventually landed on, you could capture about 95% of the world's higher education systems. Like we're missing a few big ones like Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, mainly in Africa. But other than that, there actually is way more international data that is comparable, if you work out it a bit, than is generally understood. And so that was really what we decided to do. The other big thing that we did here, and I think you'll see it if you look closely at this slide and maybe the next one, is that we focused on institutions. Now most people don't do that. Most people try and focus on what's called the what's called the international, I'm forgetting what ISCA it means now, but international standard for comparisons for education levels, right? So, you know, there's level five and level six and level seven, and that's usually what we mean by higher education. And the problem is, is that no country actually arranges their system by ISCA levels, right? So it actually it's really hard. ISCA is like a kind of a policy Esperanto that doesn't necessarily work all that well for anybody, like you can translate things with it, you can sort of understand what's going on. But and so what we did was we said, okay, let's look really carefully at the types of institutions in all these different countries, and let's see if we can both make comparisons and aggregate things. So for instance, we can tell you now, so what we ended up with was a system of roughly seven types of high of institutions in which higher education is delivered, of which we really look at five. But for instance, we can now make much better comparisons on what we call short cycle higher education, which in America you would call community colleges. And what does that look like in the rest of the world? Who are the countries that have this? What are their what do they spend on it? What are their student numbers in here? I was actually, this is actually one of the bigger surprises I went through is actually China is the next biggest community college provider, and they have a really big community college system between the two countries that's sort of 60% of short cycle education in the world, right? That's like a, it's a really big number, those two together. So that allowed us to make some really interesting cross national comparisons, not just at the level of a higher education system, but at a more precise higher education day. Also allowed us, if you moved to the next slide, allowed us to start making some much better comparisons of international systems. So when you ask the question like, what are the, you know, who has a system like America, you can actually tell now roughly what it is, right? How far away are all these, and it's basically, this is all based on how many types of institutions they have and which types of institutions they have. And you can see there's a couple of countries that look very, very different than the others, right? So South, South Asia is clearly it's one zone. You know, sort of the old Soviet Union is one zone along with China. They've just got certain institutional patterns that grew up over decades. And so it's, you know, and then you get a kind of a system which is sort of Germany and the Nordics and you get a system which is the, you know, sort of an undifferentiated university system. You kind of see that in Turkey and Algeria and Spain. So it's interesting that way too. But I think where we were able to make some real progress that others have not made before, if you just move to the next slide is we've actually been able to make much better data on funding. So funding of particular by type of institution, public private, you know, hybrids, universities, university colleges, we can look at all that kind of stuff. And we can not, we've actually got a reasonable shot, not just at public spending, but also private spending too, at least in the global north, global south is a little bit tricky, but the global north is there. So again, the level of detail of comparisons you can make here are huge. And the last area which nobody's ever really done just to take one look at this last slide here is tuition fees and student financial aid. And so we've actually, we can actually tell you how many no one's ever done this for how many student loans are there out there every year in the world, how many how much student grant is there. And of course, you know, what it comes down to the United States is actually about half of world student financial aid, what both in terms of loans and in terms of the Pell Pell is by far the largest policy, you know, program in the world, like it's just it's unbelievable how large it is compared to other national systems. But you know, we could you can see that data, the whole thing's coming out for free on January 25. That's the fun part. You all get to see it. And I expect there'll be a lot of, you know, people talking to us about this stuff for the rest of the year. So that'll be a big part of 2022. For us, the other really big project is has to do with knowledge translation in in midsize cities. If you read my stuff, you know, I'm always a little bit frustrated with the amount of hand waving that goes on about the you know, how do you how do institutions contribute to their communities? And I think there's lots of ways that they do so. But we're caught in certain myths about these things. And part of it is because when we've looked at this kind of knowledge transfer, technology transfer, a lot of it has happened in what we now call clusters, right? So, you know, started with Emily Saxena and and and those people, it's all the here's how, you know, is information escapes from universities and goes into these clusters. And in Europe, there's a pretty robust research tradition saying, look, what happens when you put universities in tiny remote communities? And the answer is not as much as you think, but it's it's interesting line of research, right? But most of us don't live in a cluster or in, you know, Northern Norway, right? We live somewhere in between, we live in midsize cities, which are not which don't have labor markets deep enough to create clusters. So okay, so how and these midsize universities are often very big and do really good research, right? I mean, that's, you know, it's an issue that I think a lot of, you know, flagships in Western Western United States have the ones that are not in in big cities, they all have this kind of issue like, okay, so what is it they're doing to expand the local economy? And it's a complicated answer. And you have to start with the community and work backwards towards the university. Right? So why are this, you know, you ask firms, why are you, why are you here? Like, why are you located here? And it's interesting in the modern economy, it's usually because, you know, the founder lives there. Like, it's not more comp, they're not, they're not chasing factors of production. You know, so you have to sort of go back, why are you here? When do you thrive? What are the conditions under which your business works? Or your could doesn't have to be business could be a public sector organization too. What does knowledge have to do with that? And that could be ideas, you know, knowledge crystallized in the form of technology transfer, it could be knowledge crystallized in the form of the skills that students have, and or graduates have. And then from back there, you sort of think, so how do you actually interact with the institution? Now, I mean, my view is, you know, in a large part that a lot of the big American State universities have got this stuff right. They've really focused around the connection between ideas, and students, and business development, because they put them together in one unit office, not a big, big State universities where technology transfer and career services and business, business relations are one unit. We're not there in Canada. And most of the world is not there. So this research that we're doing at a number of sites across Canada, which is, you know, partly in the community and partly at institutions is a way of trying to set a say, guys, we're missing, we may be missing a trick here. Or maybe there are some examples that are really good. And let's try and share these examples. So we're working in partnership with a number of institutions. And that's going to be taking up an awful lot of our time next year. Well, that's too huge research efforts. Yeah, my gosh. And, and I'd love to see that the ladder. In fact, I have questions about the ladder, because I'm looking at climate change and higher education and looking at that community academic relationship. Yeah, very important. Friends, I'm going to ask Alex a couple of more questions just to get the ball rolling. But this form is for you. So thinking about his the data that he and his team have put together about higher education globally. This is your time to put questions to him. And in fact, before I can even say anything, we have a question coming to you from Texas. This is from Tom Haynes in the Houston area. And he asks, Have you measured any correlations between quantity of education and quality of education in these countries? No. And two, I mean, two obvious reasons, right? I mean, number one is we've, we've only just finished the quality, the quantity stuff, I would say, right? We're just, we've just got that framework together. I think what we've done in this piece is lay down a framework where we can start to do a lot more interesting kinds of work later, right? So we can do a lot of work around research output after this, we can do a lot of work around, you know, looking at change in enrollments versus change in employment or change in industry types, you know what I mean? Like this, this, this, but this is a huge this is a foundational effort right now. I think, you know, over the next four or five years, we're going to build it up and up so that we can do, you know, sort of regular themes. I mean, on the quality question, I mean, you know, there's always a question, what do you call in quality? I mean, it's easy enough to do some of those things. And I mean, if you're interested in it, I know they've stopped doing it now, but the way they, the U21 used to do a ranking of universities, national university systems, which had some interesting data on quantity and quality if you wanted to use it that way. They, which I thought was kind of interesting. Now the guy who did it, I'm blanking on his name now, but he was at Melbourne University. He's retired and so they just stopped producing it. But while it was coming out, it was an interesting way of looking at national outputs in a variety of things. So I would say if you're interested in that, take a look at some of their... U21. Yeah. Well, thank you. Tom, as always, a really good question. If you're new to the forum, friends, that's how easy it is to ask a text question. I wanted to kick things off a bit by shifting from the quality issue back to the quantity issue for a second. In our lifetimes, the global goal has been to get as many humans as possible, as much post-secondary experience as possible. And I know that from roughly 1980 to about 2005, overall, the population grew remarkably in nations like China. I'm wondering where we stand now. Are we still growing post-secondary experience, not to mention attainment, or are we like in the US, actually falling back? I think we found... I can't remember the exact number. There are 13 to 14 countries that have dropped enrollment since about 2011. So there seems to have been whatever the different countries have their baby booms and whatever at different times. But the US is one of about 11 or 12 countries where we seem to decline. And in fact, in the global north as a whole, enrollments have been declining since not long after the financial crisis. It's a completely different story in the south. The south is still... it's not increasing as fast as it was in that period 2000 to 2010. But it is still growing, probably two, three percent a year in the global south. And so that keeps pulling the numbers up. You have to think that at least in China we're getting pretty close to a top. China is just... I mean the numbers keep going up and the demographic age pool, that 18 to 21 pool, keeps going down. Now that turns around a little bit in a few years. The number of Chinese students does start going up again towards the end of this decade. But I think we're going to be... growth there has slowed a bit. India is the real story, I think. And it's sort of the misunderstood story of how things have changed, because people have tended to focus on those big schools, the IITs and things like that. And that is where a lot of the money has gone. But the real story is they've added tens of thousands of new colleges. Now, which I'm not sure how to describe, but they're called university colleges. And so what happens is you open up a place that's got 400 students in some small town in Uttar Pradesh and you align your curriculum with that of a large university and you offer degrees. But that's where most of the action has been in higher education in the last few years. Just the huge proliferation of these university colleges, tens of thousands of them, that have accommodated most of the growth of about 20 million Indian students that have happened in the last 15 years. That's an extra 20. India has grown an entire higher education system in the last 15 years. And they're mostly doing it at these really cheap and small university colleges. That's an amazing fact. I mean tens of thousands of those. That's tremendous. Not super efficient, but it's about scale. Yeah, and it's the thing about India and I think it's what we're seeing a lot in private education, because a lot of those are private too, right? Globally what we're seeing is that we're not making new public institutions or not making very many of them anymore. We're just making them bigger. Whereas the private institutions keep growing in number, but they're not attaining size or scale. So we're, go ahead please. You know, that's exactly it. No, that's it. It's interesting to speculate why that is. I'm not sure I have a really good answer for it, but it is a pretty broad global trend. But the private institution numbers are growing. Yeah, and it's tricky because India has very funny ways of describing things. So it's a big increase if you include a lot of the Indian stuff. The Indians have what they are privately chartered, but they're publicly funded. We have tended to count them as public. And if you count them that way, the number of private institutions is growing, but it's not growing hugely fast, right? Like it's gone from sort of 30% to now 35% of all institutions in the world. You know, it's sorry, the number, the percentage of students. So the institution numbers are growing, but the share of total students that they're taking is not growing as quickly. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. In your typology of different nations, is there any other nation like India's higher education system? No, well, so Pakistan and Bangladesh have the same system. It's a system that's descended from the University of London system, right? So the University of London used to be a mostly a degree grant. It was a testing agency, right? And anybody who wanted to could teach to that and then you could get a University of London test and lots of universities in the developing world started out as far flung fragments of the University of London. So Macquarie University in Uganda is one of those. In India, basically they said, let's just do that locally. So they've got, you know, sort of four or five hundred genuine universities and then another 20 or 30,000 university colleges. Same thing in Bangladesh, same thing in Pakistan, because that pattern was set before partition. There was Delhi University and Bombay and those kinds of places. There were not many universities in pre-partition India, but there were enough to set a pattern that those three share. You get it in a couple of countries in Africa, but not many other places. It's interesting to see how that wonderful map, that typology by nation, reflects such deep history. I mean, seeing that British colonial history and then seeing the Soviet bloc history, I mean, persisting for decades. We had a quick question from Annie Epperson about the Indian defining the schools by public and private and she asks, isn't that public-private change flipped in the US with often religious colleges floundering and even closing? Yeah, but then the US doesn't have a growing population, or at least that, you know, you're on that demographic downturn, right? That's coming in. So I think that's, yes, it's happening different ways. I mean, you're not seeing huge numbers of institutions going under in the US. You're seeing floundering covers a lot of ground, right? So they may not be doing too well, but they're not going under. They're not disappearing. And I don't really have a way of looking at that in other countries. I mean, there are a lot of colleges. The big argument in India right now is actually around engineering call about teaching engineering in those colleges, because engineering enrollments in India are now decreasing and decreasing quickly. Because so many of these places were teaching substandard engineering courses, right? So eventually, when you over produce something, the market does kind of react. There's a similar thing in Iran. Iran's numbers in higher education are down quite a bit in the last four or five years, and it seems to be because there was a big kerfuffle about overeducation and graduate unemployment around 2014, 2015. And you can see the numbers start to drop off after that. That's interesting. Annie, thank you. That's a really good question. And Alex, thank you for that very, very precise answer. We have a video question coming from David Stone at the awesome University of Michigan. So let me just bring him up on stage. David. Hello. Hello. Hopefully I'll be there in a second. You are there. Good. You can hear me? We can hear and see you with your gold M on you. Very good. Excellent. Yeah. So you've been, thanks for having me here. But my question that kind of builds on some of the things you've been talking about so far about kind of global expenditures and things. I'm just wondering if you have any sense of you know what the trends are in terms of the types of higher education, post-secondary education that's being invested in by different countries across the world. Thinking it from maybe from a U.S. lens, the vocational community college, regional state research. Do you have any insight in terms of like, is there a particular region or particular countries? Are they focusing or refocusing resources on a particular area strategically? I'm just curious if you have come across any type of global trends as you've been looking at this data? So I think the answer is, is that most of the action is probably happening where we can't see it and that's in private expenditures and higher education. Public expenditures, they're pretty sticky, right? Like people have trouble shifting between institutions and between institutions or types of institutions. Casionally get an example like Chile where they just say, hey, we have no public short cycle education. We should have public short cycle education so they dump a bunch of money in it. And that happens, right? I think you got to remember the period that we're looking at, we've got data that goes back to 2006. I don't know why, but for some reason in most countries that's where the internet began or at least the posting of data on the internet began and so that's where you can get the numbers from. 2006 to 2018, certainly the first half of that or two thirds of that was an era where people were trying to invest in research universities, right? Everyone wants to be a top 100 university and blah, blah, blah. We don't actually see that much of a switch in funding to those institutions, though, right? Like that it seems to me that a lot of that was rhetorical. I mean, I'll give you an example of Germany, right? So Germany put money into institutions two ways. They had two big chunks of new money that went in before the last government, so it was pretty 2014. And one of them was the much-wanted excellence program, right? And they actually said, we're going to make German Ivy League. I think that was actually the term they used, right? There's, we want certain institutions that are beacon institutions, they're very research-intensive and I think I saw Emily somewhere in here and certainly it was interesting to watch German universities so blatantly ape American ones. Anyway, if none of you have read Emily's book yet, please do allies and rivals, German-American academic exchange, it's fantastic. But this is an example of it going the other way. And she's our guest next week. Ah, perfect, perfect. Please continue. Well, I will, I'll come in for that one. But the amount of money that they were actually putting on it was tiny. Like everybody made a huge, oh my, look at this excellence award. I think it maybe was 1% of total funding, maybe 1% of total funding where they put more money was actually on access. They put in a really big, this was about the time when they would decide, okay, tuition fees is not the way to go. We're going to take tuition fees off. But we have this huge capacity problem in German higher education. So let's shove a bunch of money in and they did. And that was a much bigger piece of money, but it went more equally to all existing institutions, right? Not the top institutions. So I'm not seeing very many instance, I mean, we can see different patterns across countries of where they spend the money. But we don't see a lot of cases where they're genuinely shifting the money a lot, just because there's that political inertia. Once you start giving money, it's hard to take it away. And so, Pradoff, we have time for one more question. The follow up, I guess, would be if it's not the public funds that are making moving the needle in terms of change and kind of shifting the landscape. Who are the private entities that are part of this ecosystem, essentially? Healthcare systems. That's a really big way. So it's noticeable. So I mean, there's a number of countries where universities balance sheets are have a huge exposure to the healthcare system, by which I mean, they run hospitals and they run hospitals. I don't want to say for, you never want to say for profit with universities, but in order to redistribute to other parts of the institution, let's put it that way. Prevention. Yeah. And so you look at Germany, right? Germany, if you look at what German institutions actually get from their ministry, it's not that big. Like of German university balance sheets, to a large extent, depend on hospitals. And you see that in Taiwan. You see that in Japan. You see it in the US. I think Malaysia is the other one. So there's a number of countries like that where you see really big changes. We see being increases there. There's a few countries where student fees are, it's not students, by the way. We get about the same number of countries where you see student fees going up as countries where student fees are going down. I don't think there's a particularly clear pattern there. To the extent there's a pattern is they're going up in the north and in the global north and they're not going up in the global south. And that will bite the global south in the medium term because they're growing so much and they're trying to do it on tighter and tighter budgets. But those are the two big ones. You take students, you take hospitals. There's the very weird case of American universities and their sports franchises. But there's not really any, there's a couple of other places in the world where that happens like Mexico and Chile but it's not huge. Yeah. Well David, thank you very much for that question. Please stay warm. Thank you. If you're new to the forum by the way that's an example of video question and in fact I'll make it even easier. If you don't want to press that button I'll just put this up on stage. Just hit that teal colored podium button and you'll be beamed up on stage. So you can see Alex is friendly and I'll be helpful so if you have more questions. While people are thinking of questions Alex I wanted to ask another one if I could at this macro level. I'm astonished it just how powerful this data will be for us thinking about higher education globally. What's happening with the stem enrollment? Can you can you tell we're looking at a kind of mega tide of rising stem or is it is it pausing or where's I head? I wish I could tell you that because that's one of the things we chose to leave out of this. So I don't know. I don't know my look it's never it's very rare I mean I look at about a half dozen countries because they're the ones I compare Canada to on a more regular basis outside this project. A lot of the stem stuff I think actually depends on whether or not you consider health part of stem. And that's that's a real difference because actually if you put stem and health together there's not huge differences. Like the US is not oh it's not stem heavy. But yeah the health students in and oh okay actually it doesn't look that different from some other countries that you tend to think of as being science powerhouses. So I tell you in Canada we've gone from about 28 percent stem no 30 percent stem to 40 percent stem in the last decade. Sorry stem plus health put an awful lot of that as international students. Oh Canada is great at that. Oh yeah sure. All you got to do is tack the equivalent of a green card onto any student coming into the country. And yeah you get a lot of international students. Yeah and avoid electing presidents that backfire for that. But well I guess I don't want to lean on you for something that you ruled out or you scoped out of the study. Let me ask a different question then. As you know in a lot of higher education discussion there's controversy over privatization marketization the corporate campus the neoliberal campus. I'm curious when you're looking worldwide at the financial support for higher education is the trend towards increasing privatization or do you see countervailing trends with state governments national governments continuing to support higher ed. Government so what's interesting is is the global north and the global south are both converging on public support of higher education being about 1.1 1.2 percent of the economy. The north is a little bit above that right now and the south is below but it's very clear that they're converging over time. But if you look at institutional expenditures right which implicitly takes the private stuff into account even if lots of countries don't measure it very well. So there's lots of countries you can say here's public expenditure here's total expenditure and you can sort of infer that most of the rest of it is private. You don't really know where it's coming from. You don't know if it's coming from health care or not. Right it's just sort of part of the problem that we have and looking at that. But I think what you're seeing is that in the north institutions there has been a reduction in public funding per student if you go back far enough it sort of stopped a few years ago. But that this is more than made up for by increases in income from non public sources. Right so there's a net gain if you actually just look at total expenditures of universities in the global north and whether that's the U.S. or anybody else it's up. And I would argue in that sense in some cases neoliberalism works. Neoliberalism gives institutions a an incentive to go after students that a fully free system doesn't. And I think one of the most interesting cases in the last few years is Sweden. Sweden which has you know no tuition fees their universities just decide to stop enrolling so many students around 2012 2012 and they brought it they just brought it they just said you know what we need better working conditions we should have fewer students per teacher. I see. And they did that by reducing the number of students. It was wild. It wasn't a demographic thing. They just said yeah we we I mean they framed it in terms of quality right. Yeah. It was completely impossible for me to think of a north American university that would ever do something like why would you reduce the number of students that you have right. If you're a public institution anyway. But you do see that in some places. So I think that's a big deal. In the south what you're seeing you are seeing a lot of countries that are starting to bring in some kind of free tuition. Most of the examples of free tuition in new free tuition programs in the global south though tend to be in countries with very high levels of private higher education. So you probably heard about Chile and the they got to be Dodd program which is free tuition for students from the lower sex deciles. Okay. It's still two-thirds two-thirds of students are going to private universities because that's where they can get in right. Like when when the when the government said yeah I'm going to make public education free. They also limited the number of spaces so that people couldn't just switch over from private public. Same thing with the Philippines right. So Duerte one of the things he did early on was he made tuition free in public universities in the Philippines. Again public universities in the Philippines educate one in four one in five students and the rest are private institutions. So what's really happening it's not that people are looking like Sweden or Germany which is what they think they're doing and the way it's usually portrayed. They're not they're starting to look like Brazil right which which has the same kind of system. At least as far as as financing is concerned. And I think it's a problem like I think in a lot of those countries. You're having a huge problem. How do you bring new students into the system if you aren't asking students to pay for it. Kenya has had a tuition fee freeze for 20 years now 22 years. Huge problems that they're having now because they that's a great example of mass expansion of higher education. They went from about 150,000 students to about 400, 450,000 students in six years. Oh it's just it is one of the most amazing stories in global higher education but they did it without raising tuition fees and they didn't actually have enough money to do it. And so what's happening now is the universities are what was the word used early floundering. It's a bit of a problem. It's a bit of a problem. It's there's no easy way to massify. I don't think entirely on the public dime. This is one of the many reasons why I'm glad I'm glad that you're here. You have this this incisive grasp of the data but also this keen attention to the business models and the economics of it. Building up where you were just saying we have a question here about Africa it's a more general question from Michael. What's the status of higher rate in Africa? I think you can you share with us some of the thoughts about the differences there and Michael if you want to join us to press on that question further please feel free. I mean you have to remember so if we're talking Michael feel free to elaborate on that question. I'll start answering it if you want to come up to the podium in most of sub-Saharan Africa you've seen a doubling in student numbers over the last 12-13 years but from a really low base. Okay like there's there's like Nigeria and Ghana apart like most of East Africa we calculate we're talking about participation rates of under 10% still or just getting to 10% compared to about 70 or 80% in the United States. So just to give you a sense of how big it is in some cases financially they're they can be quite what's the word they look rich so some of the countries with the highest expenditures as a percentage of GDP in the world are in Africa but you have to think about why that is it's because they're paying vastly over the odds for staff because if I got a PhD in Africa I'm mobile and so universities actually have to pay salaries that actually that makes sense so they're paying so you know the the position the social position of the professor in most of Africa is significantly higher than it is in North America right just because you have to pay those kinds of over the particularly in the Anglophone countries is less so in some of the other ones you're paying for scientific equipment on the world scale right and and you're doing it in US dollars not local dollars and so it's it's really expensive to run institutions in Africa and as a result one of the ways that those institutions massified was by avoiding the sciences wow tons of business degrees in Africa tons of business degrees in Africa so and you know pretty much every church in I'm just thinking like two countries and well Ghana and Tanzania a lot of the universities the private university showed up right to church universities right they were church run they were not for profit they're not I mean there's a couple of those around but they were you know they sort of well we're a social agency we we can house you in our basement for a while while you grow and and and eventually they'll build universities but those are largely being built on social sciences and and business not humanities I mean there's a couple of interesting institutions that focus on humanities at Shacy University in Ghana which is run by a Swarthmore grad I think essentially he's built this fence fascinating little liberal arts slash business university on a hill a couple hours outside Accra and it's a phenomenal little place but it's not the model for higher education they just they can't afford that kind of thing he's done that mostly with U.S. grants or donations from from from big U.S. philanthropists so I guess that's the question is it's really expensive to do this kind of thing in in Africa and that's one of the reasons that it's not as as big as it might be but you've got to remember also that we've got it's only about a decade since universal secondary education became a thing in Africa so people were working toward that was a millennium goal and so but it didn't become prevalent in Africa I would say till about 2010 2012 and so there's huge demand for higher education but meeting that demand is very very difficult when you think about all the other priorities that that those governments have in terms of social priorities and health and food security those kinds of things if there's huge demand for higher ed in in Africa and there's issues meeting that locally given the demographics that sub-saharan Africa for example is still producing kids at scale should we expect to see European North American universities and colleges really aggressively recruit from Africa well they do in Nigeria I think there's a fascinating study a few years ago that Nigerians actually spend because of the different tuition fee levels Nigerians actually spend more university more money on university tuition in the UK than they do in Nigeria oh right and this is the thing if you let them go for the millions who are going free or almost free in Nigeria don't outweigh the you know 30 or 40 thousand who are paying you know whatever it is 15-16 thousand pounds of pop in in the UK you are seeing pushes I think for graduate education certainly I think some of the stuff that the the UN has done with the African Centers of pardon me not the UN the World Bank with the African Centers of Excellence programs has been to start to create serious graduate level programs in sub-saharan Africa and they've been very successful to it there's some really really interesting stuff so you know the university that sequenced the Ebola virus is a tiny little religious school just outside Lagos who happened to have like you know one guy who was retired from Harvard and wanted to you know still putter around but he got himself a certain amount of money in a lab and that's teaching a whole new generation of teachers for Africa not teach but I mean university level teachers so you will start to see graduate education go up there might be some movement there there are some universities that are dropping a lot of money on Africa specific mooks and Africa specific and I'm thinking ETH Lausanne is the one they have spent an enormous amount of money and I remember talking to them a few years ago and they said look we're the first you know we're the first Western University in most of those countries to them we're going to be Harvard sure that's 30 40 years down the line but to them we're going to be Harvard and so it is interesting to see you know you've got to have a long view you can't just be coming in and you know scooping up students who seem to be available this year but I think research partnerships are going to become a lot more interesting between North America and and African institutions I think particularly in agriculture so you know and you've got some American universities already do that kind of stuff right so MS Michigan State and Indiana they've got so both of them had pretty deep roots in Africa and I just think there's there's a lot of growth to be done there if they get their business model right and it's tough because you know the big example 20 years ago everybody looked to the UK or they looked to US now they look to South Africa South Africa is the model for most of Africa now and the South African model is not working so well but but that's that was an interesting change that happened about 10 years ago I'd say and I noticed it at the time just thinking I should probably learn more about South Africa if I'm going to work here because that's clearly where everybody's looking right now and I bet the the early discovery of the Omicron COVID variant from South Africa was a good a good fill up for them too therapy until the bands hit you the travel bands hit yeah well the and the bands are still wrong Michael thank you does a really great question and Alex I really appreciate that gazetteer of of where Africa is we have another question building on this from Sonya Stroll let me put this on the screen and she asks do you see online education being a driver and reducing the cost of education in areas such as Africa if so how do you address infrastructure issue to facilitate that big question thank you Sonya you'd think so wouldn't you and yet it hasn't happened there were some really interesting I forget who was doing it but people were trying to work with accreditation systems in places like Rwanda so you could go to an educational hub let's call it in Kigali and you could take MOOCs from you know all the Coursera and edX MOOCs and you know couldn't somebody step in and turn that into a degree somehow couldn't you have people who would do that for exactly the reasons that the that question asked that didn't work so well I actually think that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in Africa is those accreditation bodies it's actually it's national quality assurance bodies that think that everything has to look like you know you ever see one well they're pretty input focused right like they're not they're not even as high as like you know as sort of as American accreditors like it's very much to how many teachers do you have and how many how much space per student is there like it's very very and it's by the book right there's not a lot of imagination in terms of how they do that kind of stuff moving to a more output focused system is really important and I've said for a while if anybody really wants a big philanthropic policy in Africa don't fund the institutions find the regular fund fund training for the regulators are those mostly public yeah absolutely yeah okay oh that's thank you Sonia a really good question we have more questions just piling in as we're down to our last few minutes so I I want to make sure everyone gets a shot Denise Roy has a really good one too she's interested in the portability of degrees across borders considering regulatory immigration other factors what do you're discovering in your research on that no one knows how to do it well no one well short of going the the European route right which is I mean Bologna has a route which requires everybody all countries to have similar types of accreditation systems and to have similar credit systems and etc etc that works and most people don't have the patience for that yeah sure it works it works most people don't have the patience for that what you tend to see is people change when there's some kind of emergency so actually one of the most interesting places to look at to look at cross border recognition right now is Colombia which has one and a half million Venezuelans living inside its borders who they're you know don't don't look like they're going back anytime soon and so all of a sudden people have got to figure out how do I assess Venezuelan credentials it's a big deal same a Chile much of Latin America has this problem right now Chile has a lot of Venezuelans as well so there's some interesting work going on in Latin America around that stuff I don't see it and you know I guess there was some interesting stuff during the refugee crisis you know sort of 2015 2016 you know what do you do what do you do with two million Syrians who've lost their documents and so there was a fair bit of work you know how do you how do you deal with that how do you try and make that work I'm not sure how innovative most of it was a lot of it was just a long hard slog but how can I put it it's a weird discussion to have from a North American perspective because we hate systems everyone just likes doing their own thing the Europeans sit down and make systems and so not only do they have a you know a whole sort of you know a way of recognizing credits and credentials they also have a way of recognizing skills and careers if you've ever looked at ESCO right which is which is actually a way of standardizing occupational descriptions and titles and skill levels across Europe that is a to my mind is actually a much bigger issue in mobility than the credential mobility and you know and you're just trying to imagine could you imagine 50 states do it could you even imagine a state doing it internally not that you could you imagine doing it 50 states but we have the same problem in Canada right I mean we our labor markets kind of work the same way and it's difficult to imagine yeah that kind of stuff because it requires so much public coordination the Bologna process may be a one-off yeah Southeast Asia is looking like they might give it a good run right there actually is the Bologna process Southeast Asia is interesting more interesting than I thought it would be when it started seven or eight years ago they've stuck it out quite a long ways but worth looking at Malaysia was very interested in being a regional hub so yeah but let me let me step away I don't want to get in the way of we have questions we have a Bill Hendrick except me Heinrich has a question and this has to do with one country in particular sorry Bill can you hello hello hi Dr. Arshur I have your blog thanks read it every day you've published it you mentioned South Africa being a model that is both not working and being emulated and can you say more about what's not working it's broke thanks they the government essentially forced what you in the states would call unfunded mandates to take on students and unfunded mandates to stop outsourcing cleaning and security and those kinds of things and just didn't add any money and told the universities they couldn't ask for more tuition fees so there were 20 I'm forgetting the year now I think it was 2015 there was what's called there were so there was there was the roads must fall right you know sort of and then for the next two years there were the fees must fall discussions and there's a couple of good books on on those which I think are kind of interesting but they're out of money but at the same time they still produce better science and better scientists and better professors than most of the rest of the continent so even though it is seen as failing internally that South Africa is feeling like it it is it is failing that they're not working very well that they're under deep pressure and they can't keep it up the rest of the continent says boy could we ever do with a university like you know Western Cape or you know University of Johannesburg so the individual the individual institutional models are being emulated while the made the national funding model is broken yeah I think I'm hearing okay yeah thanks oh bill thank you for the question good to see you and I hate to rush things I just want to make sure everyone gets a chance to to put up their questions for you we have one more taking a shift to another continent this is one after my own heart I'm from Doyle who asks what's happening to Russian universities and surrounding areas and what he's saying surrounding areas I'd read you know former Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact perhaps yeah Russia's putting a lot of money into you know so I mean there's two things right I would say in the last three four months as with a lot of things in Russia things are getting heated politically you're seeing university directors being carted off to jail that kind of thing so obviously it's worrying in that level Russia has had for the last I'm gonna say eight years a project called it was the five one hundred project which was a way of trying to get five Russian universities into the top 100 which was you know never gonna happen but they but it still has it's what's interesting is instead of giving up quickly as many of the sort of authoritarian countries do when they don't get the results in these kinds of get rich quick higher education schemes they actually stayed with it and they're it's a pretty they've really modernized their funding system their research numbers are getting better they're getting better targeting money to individual institutions to get results I won't say it's great but it is a country where we've seen you know big numbers the rest of the old Soviet Union look in the stands you have very Russian like systems except that there's a lot more private money in them because the governments are broke you know one country I'd love to look at more is actually is Ukraine which until the war with Russia started in 2014 actually had very Scandinavian levels of funding which I didn't realize that they were funding them that well and now you know funding's dropped by about a third since since 2014 but it's they managed to keep some of their scientific infrastructure in a way that other parts of the Soviet Union did not and eventually that will stand them in good stead although peace first I guess okay well thank you Doyle good question and Alex again I'm astonished at the amount of knowledge you have about all of this we have another question from General Bondo who asks how do you think the move to online education the major institutions around the world ahead to make how will that impact the global ecosystem in the next decade it's a fascinating question because there are very few institutions who are online players in online who bother to go across national borders you just think about in the States right like you know ASU ASU has done huge stuff in international they're sorry in online they're not doing anything in international at least via online right I can go down the list there's a there's a number of other American campuses where you see that pattern I think until we get to the point where someone cracks the secret of how to deliver online education for full degrees possibly shorter degrees I'm not saying the degree length isn't going to change necessarily I don't think it's going to change very much I'm and what's interesting to me is that we just did a survey of this for a client but if you go around the five eyes the five us the five anglophone exporting countries what's fascinating is nobody wants to reduce their prices so they can imagine the idea of you know of selling a two-year degree to someone in India they can't imagine doing it cheaper than what they're doing so that great experiment you had at Georgia state you know that Georgia State AT&T MOOC nobody's picking that up everyone's saying I can't undercut my own programs this I mean the idea of disrupting higher education that's been hugely oversold in many cases in this one I think there's something there I think there's actually someday someone's going to figure out what the right equation is to do that and there that will change things but I don't see I don't see anyone doing it yet okay well the one thing I do see us doing is unfortunately coming to an end this is we're at the top of the hour and I have to pause things Alex thank you for being a fantastic guest I'm just astonished how much information you'd be able to share what's the best way for us to keep up with with you and this work how can we you know besides subscribing to one start we'll unfold to start your day that is if you can put up with me every morning in your inbox that is the best way to keep up with me but we you know our website is www.hiredstrategy.com and January 25th you'll start seeing there'll be a big web a launch webinar with university world news in in mid-January so you'll be able to start seeing some of the stories then good well I'm really looking forward to that and thank you thank you once again thanks for having me this was fun well my pleasure my pleasure but don't go away friends I need to you know where we're headed over the next few weeks and so just to remind you that we have a whole series of topics coming up in addition to data we're looking at disability eco-media literacy climate crisis research universities libraries and careers minority students on campus we're also continuing to talk about this so if you'd like to dive into individual nations and their online work or what happens to online education just please hit us up on Twitter I'm Brian Alexander we have Shindig events just use the hashtag F-T-T-E and of course if you want to visit my blog just go to BrianAlexander.org where we talk about this kind of thing if you'd like to dive into the past and look at our previous sessions on data and global education just look at the archive tinyurl.com slash FTF archive remember to subscribe above all thank you all for the great questions and comments today it's always a pleasure to learn with all of you and to work with all of you together and to think with all of you together we're almost out of 2021 it's been a wild year I've been honored to do it in the company of all of you please take care keep up the great work and we'll see you online bye bye