Highlights from Professor Rosovsky’s presentation

Professor Rosovsky stated, "It is a great honour for me to present to this distinguished and knowledgeable audience the main results of our report. I noticed by the way, with great interest, that you changed the title…Our report's title is Higher Education in Developing Countries, Peril and Promise. I note that the title here states Potential and Promise and I must say I would like that rather better, so if we were to print another edition, I think, I would now call the report Peril, Promise and Potential… .Let me turn to our task force. We were created by the World Bank and by UNESCO as an international commission of independent experts. What we produced is not an official World Bank document. Although, actually the President of the World Bank, Mr. Wolfenson received the document and associated himself with our findings… .Why did the World Bank create the commission at this time?…any person will understand instinctively the growing importance of higher education for social and economic development...contribution of Higher Education to national development and poverty eradication had traditionally been mis-measured by social scientists…social scientists and economists, gave particular measure to contribution of education in terms of the private return to the individual. And that is particularly a poor way of looking at the contribution of higher education...the public return to higher education is particularly important… . Furthermore, in an age of knowledge revolution…human capital is the key…We attempted to answer three questions: 1) What is the role of higher education in enhancing and supporting economic and social development? 2) What are the measured obstacles for higher education in performing that crucial role? 3) How can these obstacles be overcome?

“I have already said we cannot deal with specific countries. Specific countries have to deal with these issues themselves. But what we tried to do instead was to produce an essay, designed to stimulate examination and discussion that will deal with our arguments from the point of view of each particular country…;divided into a description of the current situation in the developing world…;and then five topics that we chose because of their importance, and because of the fact that they had not been dealt with sufficiently… . There are a series of traditional difficulties...inadequate qualification for faculty, and poor facilities…poor compensation, funding that fluctuates a great deal, those are all traditional difficulties, but add to that what we called new realities and the new realities are tremendous expansion of private education… . According to the world development report, global interpersonal inequality arose substantially in the 19th Century…As a result of the technological revolution, of the knowledge revolution, of the knowledge based society, of the importance of human capital, particularly at the high skill level, there is again a growing gap between rich and the poor countries... . The industrial revolution of the 18th Century…had very little contribution from higher education.  James Watt…had no conception of the science that underlay the steam engine. He did not need to. He knew how to do it practically…If you look at the information technology revolution, if you look at the biomedical sciences, at genetics, and at aspects of physics, we are now in a situation where, what the university teaches, the knowledge that the university has, is absolutely crucial for a country to progress. I think that is pretty clear.

“Having established these new realities we turn to our first major topic, which is to consider the public interest in higher education…Privatize this, privatize that and the feeling is of course that markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources… .While market can play a major and beneficial role, there are very important aspects of higher education that markets will not deliver. I want to stress this point, because I think it is very easy, too easy in a way too tempting for governments to say "let the markets deliver higher education…The market will never deliver basic sciences, because there is no money to be made in teaching basic sciences. And yet basic sciences are so crucial to all learning. The market also will not deliver the humanities…or the study of values…and extremely important the market will not provide access for the disadvantaged in society and to allow higher education to play its key role of being really a vehicle of upward social mobility in society…Somewhere there has to be an overall view of a system, a rational system of higher education. This system should be supervised but not controlled… . It should be stratified. Not every university can become or should be a research university. Not every vocational school should move up. There are clear roles that should be explained… . The subject of governance … was the key problem for higher education in the developing world.