I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter with Rosa Maria Torres regarding Anya Kamenetz’s graph on the cost of higher education in the U.S. She made the fair point that the graph should be labeled so that readers know the data is for the United States (which I have now done). She also asserted that the trend is probably true for OECD countries in general but maybe not for others. Since it was Twitter, we couldn’t really have a full conversation about it, but her assertion makes me curious. First of all, I’d love to see comparative data on the costs of education over time for different geographical regions. But this wouldn’t really get at the heart of the matter, since many countries in the developing world are at very different points in the higher education adoption/diffusion curve than the developed world. So it’s hard to tell from a data snapshot whether some countries are on a different trajectory or just on a different place in the same trajectory.
What I’d like to know is whether there are alternative school funding models in the developing world that people believe are (a) likely to be sustainable based on an established track record and real data, and (b) avoid some of the structural features of Western (or Northern) educational institutions and funding mechanisms that lead to massive inflation.
It could be worse. From Tuition fees 2012: what are the universities charging? we learn that:
That’s from 79% to 168% increase and judging from the data summary of Universities most seem to consider themselves in the ‘exceptional’ category.