As growing unemployment fuels record demand for higher education while stretching public debt out of proportion, the government has dusted off earlier plans to introduce university tuition fees. Statistics show that Czech universities seriously lag behind western countries in enrolment and graduation rates, the funding they receive, and the quality of education and research. A system of fees and student loans, proponents say, would enhance competition among unis and motivate them to accommodate more applicants.
“University education is increasingly considered one of the main tools for a successful career, and one of life’s best investments,” the Green Party’s Ondřej Liška wrote in January 2009, when he was education minister, in his introduction to the White Book of Tertiary Education. This is an 80-page proposal for major reform compiled by a team of experts led by Petr Matějů, a prominent Education Ministry adviser and the most vocal advocate of tuition fees. The centre-right cabinet of Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek (Civic Democrat) approved the document in January 2009 and asked Liška to draft a bill to implement the changes.
Two months later the government fell, putting the planned reform on ice, at least until October’s elections. Even then it will likely be a hard sell. The Social Democrats resolutely oppose the plan, saying it would hurt the poor. Rectors are unconvinced that it could actually boost their budgets, and academics fear that a hunt for student fees would only commercialise and not improve education. And prospective students will not want to pay for something that is now free knowing it would take years before their fees could make a difference.
Fees and friendly loans
According to the White Book, tuition fees should supplement, not replace public funding, which should still grow to levels common in western countries. Students who cannot afford to pay would have guaranteed access to government loans, grants and social benefits. Graduates would only have to pay loans back after reaching a certain income level, and even then repayment would be proportional to salary. For the first five years or so, there would be a cap on how much universities could charge; later the fees could grow at the most sought-after schools and stay low or nil for less-prestigious institutions or programmes.
“Since repayments will represent a percentage of the borrower’s income, the burden won’t be large and university graduates will still enjoy a higher disposable income than those without a degree,” Matějů said. “Schools will have to set the fees with respect to their graduates’ expected incomes – otherwise they would soon have no students. So even the study of such nonlucrative fields as philosophy or social work will remain affordable.”
Matějů and his colleagues believe tuition fees would also motivate students to choose their schools well and study hard, reducing the high dropout rates. Universities would in turn have to improve their quality, which would be measured mainly by the career success of their graduates. “Schools would have to start treating students as their customers,” Daniel Münich, another White Book co-author, said in a July interview for the daily Hospodářské noviny.
‘Antisocial and unneeded’
Leftwing politicians fear that the fees and loan repayments would strain family budgets. “We support the introduction of student loans and more social and merit-based stipends. But we can see no space for tuition fees, which are particularly unacceptable in time of recession,” said Jiří Havel, the Social Democrats’ shadow education minister and a professor of economics at Charles University. He argues that students’ living costs are already too high for many families and that students “sacrifice” the incomes they could earn if they went to work after secondary school.
Another objection raised by Havel (who is not related to the former president) is that, with students borrowing money from the state and only paying it back years later, the move would initially require a large increase in public spending. “It would take 15 to 20 years before the reform would generate additional funding for the education system,” he said. “This is economically too avant garde for me.”
Lastly, Havel questions the White Book’s very assertion that universities should open themselves up to even more students than they have today. “The demand is basically saturated. Everyone can study in the Czech Republic today if they make the effort,” he said. “Some of the best schools already suffer from a long-term shortage of quality students, and some of those enrolled fail to meet elementary standards.” He believes that educating everyone to degree level would be “expensive nonsense”.
Here Havel speaks for many older academics who fear that exponentially increased enrolment over the last 20 years has already started to somehow dilute the quality of universities: We are nearing a point, they say, at which every simpleton will be able to get higher education. This common complaint betrays a certain nostalgia for the times when the communist regime artificially kept enrolment low, particularly in humanities and social sciences. Higher education was reserved for the brightest of the brightest (plus those with connections, a good political record and money for bribes). Now, they think, we are expected to educate the ignorant masses.
Rectors and other university officials have been mostly suspicious of the White Book and its implications. Their statements share the concern that the changes would be too radical and that the proposed empowerment of students as paying customers will expose unis to ruthless external forces and subject education to the despicable commercial logic of financial investment and gain. Stanislav Štech, a deputy rector at Charles University, charges that the White Book wants to reduce higher education to a mechanical “training of the workforce”, while in fact it should fulfil a more elevated, if unspecified, “societal, cultural and humanistic mission”.
‘Fairer and more equal’
Two competing worldviews seem to be at the core of the dispute. The recent global trend – liberal and egalitarian – of educating more people to higher levels and teaching them practical skills relevant to their future jobs represents one of them. Yet the talk of “saturated demand” and a “shortage of quality students” does not merely sound elitist and self-absorbed: It also appears at odds with statistics comparing the Czech Republic with the most developed countries (see “Czech unis in numbers”).
A still more powerful argument from the White Book is that the proposed reform would, contrary to what the plan’s leftwing critics say, most benefit the poorest. In his introduction, Liška says that the enrolment boom of the last 15 years has largely failed to remove social inequalities. Citing the European Union’s Survey of Income and Living Conditions, he says that the chance that a Czech child of low-skilled workers will acquire a degree is still six times lower than that of children of university-educated parents, the worst result among EU countries. The White Book proposes to increase social mobility by giving government loans for both tuition and living costs to students whose families cannot afford to support them, and to reform the highly selective and multispeed Czech secondary education system, which sends far too many 15-year-olds to vocational schools.
The authors of the White Book point out that the countries with the highest tuition fees – the US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, the UK and the Netherlands – have most of the world’s top-ranking universities, while their high rates of post-secondary education in the population indicate good social mobility. A major exception often quoted by leftwing politicians as an example worth following is the Scandinavian countries, which offer word-class education provided entirely by public funds. Proponents of tuition fees respond that these countries’ small and wealthy populations can rely on the rich natural resources that the Czech Republic lacks and high taxes that Czechs who earn less than Swedes or Norwegians are unable and unwilling to pay.
Fees, or higher taxes
All parties involved agree that Czech universities need more money. Liška warns that, without additional funding and better access to higher education, the small country with an open economy will become “Europe’s assembly line”, with cheap but low-skilled and low-paid labour. “Our wealth must be based on knowledge and skills,” he wrote in the foreword for the White Book.
When asked how he would raise additional funding without tuition fees and without increasing public debt, Havel had a quick answer. His party would put the burden on the wealthy by reintroducing progressive taxation, which the previous centre-right government replaced with a flat rate in 2008. “Why should a rich, potbellied 50-year-old like me pay nothing,” Havel asked, “while a 30-year-old would have to repay student loans and a mortgage and support a partner on parental leave?”
If the Social Democrats come up victorious in October, rectors and prospective students can look forward to the Scandinavian model of university funding. Children from underprivileged backgrounds can only hope that the extra tax money raised by the new government will be spent with the Scandinavian efficiency and commitment to equal opportunities. To follow the UK and North American model instead, the Civic Democrats need more than just to win the early elections. They must persuade the public that tuition fees and loan repayments will not be too onerous and will really make tertiary education more accessible, and they have to convince universities that a bit of financial competition will not completely ruin their humanistic mission.
Czech unis in numbers
Only 14% of Czechs aged 25-64 had completed tertiary education in 2006, according to the 2008 report Education at a Glance, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Of the 30 members of this Paris-based policy thinktank representing the world’s most developed democratic nations, only Turkey, Portugal and Italy had fewer people educated to degree level. Among Czechs aged 25-34, only 15% held a degree, the lowest rate of all OECD member states except for Turkey.
On the enrolment side, 59% of Czechs who had just finished secondary school progressed to higher education in 2006, a leap from 34% in 2000 but still way behind the OECD average of 72%. Even post-communist neighbours Poland and Slovakia did better. The share of fresh university graduates within the same-age group was 35%, up from 19% in 2000 but below the OECD average of 46%.
Total spending on Czech tertiary education grew by 50% between 1995 and 2005 (one of the fastest rates in the OECD), but the number of students doubled in the same period. As a result, spending per student dropped drastically and represented only 33% of GDP per capita, compared with an OECD average of 40%.
