Steel versus Gold: Higher Education Mis-Match
By Lykke E. Andersen*,
La Paz,
23
October
2006.
“Everything has its limits – iron ore cannot be educated into
gold”
Mark Twain, 1835-1910
Even if you could educate iron ore into gold, it would not
necessarily be a good idea to do it. Steel is incredibly
versatile and useful and we need a lot of it, whereas gold is
mainly a luxury item, which gets its value from scarcity and has
little practical use, except for keeping track of who is married
and who is not.
The higher education system in Bolivia seems to try to turn a
lot of iron ore into gold: 90% of public spending on higher
education goes into universities (supposedly producing “gold”),
whereas 7% goes to the formation of teachers and only 3% goes to
technological institutes (producing “steel”)
(1).
There are several problems with this approach. First of all, it
creates an imbalance between supply and demand of both gold and
steel. In 2001, the demand for university graduates was around
8.000 (due to retirement and new job-creation), whereas the
supply consisted of 5.000 new graduates plus 48.000 unemployed
professionals
(1). This means a 6 to 1 ratio of supply to demand.
Second, the public universities are not very good at turning
iron ore into gold. Only about 5% of the students graduate when
they are expected to (usually after 5 or 6 years of studying),
and the average apparent graduation rate is only a little over
30%
(1). This suggests that large amounts of public money are
being
wasted on this alchemy experiment.
Third, the market is pretty good at differentiating between
“real gold” and “fake gold”, which implies significant wage differentials and/or substantial unemployment
among fake gold.
This means that both individuals and society often would be
better off
with high-grade steel instead of fake gold.
I think it is time to abandon the unrestricted access to free
university education (which mainly benefits the upper middle
class, since the poorer students rarely make it through high
school) and start thinking about what the country needs instead
of automatically funding what students think is most
fashionable. Public education spending should provide social
benefits, not just private benefits for the upper middle-class.
(*) Director, Institute for Advanced Development Studies, La
Paz, Bolivia. The author happily receives comments at the
following e-mail:
landersen@inesad.edu.bo.
(1)
Santa Cruz, José G. (2006) “La
Educación Superior en el Marco de la Descentralización: Contexto
y Perspectivas”. Documento de Trabajo 02/2006, Red de
Análisis Fiscal, Ministerio de Hacienda, La Paz, Enero.
Ó
Institute for Advanced Development Studies 2006.
The opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the
author and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Institute.
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