News & Views item - November 2010

 

 

 Higher Education Affordability and Accessibility in Comparative Perspective. (November 4, 2010)

Alex Usher and Jon Medow of Higher Education Strategy Associates late last month released their eighty-one page compendium of Global Higher Education Rankings 2010: Affordability and Accessibility in Comparative Perspective.

 

The report covers 17 countries and compares the relative affordability and accessibility of higher education in them. However, the survey makes no attempt to assess the quality of the higher education offered. Furthermore, the authors point out:

 

Originally, our hope was that we would be able to present a more expansive study, including more countries – especially developing ones – in the ranking. We have, unfortunately, been bedevilled by ongoing problems of data comparability. In particular, our hopes of expanding this analysis to more middle-and low-income countries have come to more or less nothing... We do not believe by any means that this report constitutes the last word in portraying accessibility or affordability in an international comparative perspective... This is why we have followed the terms of the International Rankings’ Expert Group’s Berlin Principles on data transparency and published the source data so that others may re-construct and weight the indicators according to their own taste.

 

The nations represented in the study:

 

Australia
Canada
Denmark
England & Wales
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Japan
Latvia
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal
Sweden
United States

 

The report features 32 tables listed below. Here we reproduce five:

 




Educational Equality Index (EEI), which measures accessibility as a ratio of socio-demographic characteristics.

 

Out-of-Pocket Costs
Out-of-pocket costs refers to the sum of expenditures for which a student must student must find resources in the short term – that is, all costs minus all student assistance, both in the form of loans and grants. It does not represent the “cost” of education accurately (because loans must be repaid) but it does represent the liquidity constraints facing students in a fair and accurate way.