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Walker's World:Europe's failing universities

By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Editor

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 (UPI) -- Across Europe, where the academic year starts later than in the United States, over 6 million students are this week packing their bags to attend or settling back into some 3,300 universities.

Some, a small handful, will be lucky, attending the ancient and venerable universities on which the reputation of higher education on the old continent still rests. Most will be attending institutions that are second or even third-rate. And many of those who will graduate with decent degrees and a sound education will soon leave Europe for the greater opportunities of the United States.

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The state of higher education in Europe is grim, and since students represent a society's willingness to invest in its own future, this is grim news for the 450 million people of the European Union.

The European Commission last year issued a sobering table, ranking the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10. The University of London made 11th place. From other EU countries, no university ranked higher than 40, and that was Holland's University of Utrecht.

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This should come as no surprise. EU countries spend 1.1 percent of GDP in universities, compared to 2.3 percent in the U.S. A recent survey by the OECD found that annual spending per student in the U.S. comes to around $20,000, roughly twice the figure in Germany and three times that in Spain.

This reflects the long-standing policy in Europe to make university education the responsibility of the state rather than of the student or the family. Private funding of university education stands at 1.2 percent of GDP in the U.S., at 0.6 percent in Japan, and at a miserly 0.2 percent in the EU (and most of this private spending comes from one country -- Britain.)

"The growing under-funding of European universities jeopardizes their capacity to attract and keep the best talent, and to strengthen the excellence of their research and teaching activities," says a new report from the EU Commission.

"Given that it is highly unlikely that additional public funding can alone make up the widening shortfall, new ways have to be found of increasing and diversifying universities' income," the report goes on -- which means that European families may soon have to start thinking of higher education as their business, and not just the responsibility of the state of the already overburdened European taxpayer.

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The EU report goes on to note that American universities have far more substantial means than European universities -- on average, they spend two to five times more per student. The resources brought by students themselves, including by the many foreign students, partly explain this gap. But American universities benefit both from a high level of public funding, including through state and federal research and defense credits, and from substantial private funding, particularly for fundamental research, provided by the business sector and philanthropic foundations. America's big private research universities like Harvard and Yale also often have considerable wealth, built up over time through private donations, particularly from graduate associations.

The EU Commission is also starting to panic at the scale of the brain drain from Europe to the U.S. They estimate that around 400,000 EU-born science researchers are working in America, some 40 percent of the total. Another Commission paper published last year found that 75 percent of EU-born U.S. doctorate recipients, who graduated between 1991 and 2000, had no plans to return to Europe. "Better prospects and projects, and easier access to leading technologies were most often cited as reasons behind plans to work abroad", the paper noted.

"European universities are in urgent need of reform," claims Richard Lambert, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, in a paper published earlier this year for the Center for European Reform that reflects the way that the weakness of EU universities is starting to worry EU business.

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"The universities have a crucial role to play in helping the EU to achieve its goal of becoming the 'most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world'," Lambert went on. "But Europe's higher education institutions are underfunded, poorly organized, over-centralized and subjected to severe political constraints. And, as European governments are already discovering, making the necessary reforms will prove both economically and politically costly."

A lot of EU investment in students is wasted through high dropout rates. Only 42 percent of Italian students taking academically oriented degrees get through their programs, possibly because European degree courses take so long -- often five years or more.

Moreover, there are simply fewer students in Europe than in the U.S. or Japan. Less than 30 percent of 25-34 year olds have complete university education in Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Austria and Italy, compared with 40 percent or more in the U.S. and Japan.

The picture is not all bleak. The EU as a whole produces slightly more science and technology graduates than the U.S. does, and science faculties in Britain, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands get very high rankings. But the best news the European (and Australian) universities have had for years has been the impact of 9/11 in clamping down on the numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. for higher education.

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According to the President of Texas A&M University, Robert Gates, applications by foreign students fell by 38 percent on last year. Applications from China to U.S. universities in general had fallen 76 percent last year, and those from India by 58 percent. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing more than 450 universities in the United States, says that international applications to U.S. graduate schools for this year have dropped 32 percent from a year ago.

Asa Hutchinson, deputy head of the Department of Homeland Security, notes that in the last 18 months new security controls have caught 1,600 visa violations and led to 155 arrests. Under the USA Patriot Act, foreign students getting a visa must be registered by their schools into a computerized database that now lists more than 700,000 nonimmigrant foreign students and exchange visitors across 7,318 institutions.

"Foreign students are the exporters of the American experience, and we must be fully committed to welcoming them," Hutchinson noted last month.

But the Europeans are now hoping that the flood of foreign student cash into their institutions will continue. Still, Europe's university woes are not going to be fixed by overseas fees alone. Europe's parents and families, and students themselves through student loans, are going to have to finance the bulk of new funding -- yet another way in which the cozy old state-run European social system is being rendered obsolete by the highly competitive new globalized capitalism that the U.S. pioneered.

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