The Big Curve

Lots of talk in OUSA-Land today about fees and the like.

This article here http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROPS-2-Douglass-BigCurve-11-12-08.pdf kind of backs up my personal view that Europe will follow what America does ie the marketisation of education will result in loads of different prices over here.

It mentions the Gravier case - this and other cases are discussed in Anne Pieter van der Mei's 'Free movement of persons within the European Community' - my impression as a non-expert is that it is all a fairly grey area.

Open University reasons to charge differently

Here is some official reasoning from last year's financial report available by hunting around on www.open.ac.uk/foi



Whereas other UK universities charge very high fees to overseas students choosing to study in the UK, The Open University provides its teaching to overseas students in the countries in which they are resident, either directly or in partnership with a range of educational and commercial organisations, at fee levels that are acceptable in each market.


This is interesting as (1) it is a change in tack from the usual reason given (lack of government funding) and (2) it is against OUSA policy.

Comparison of fees

http://hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/story/6986

The above links are good not necessarily because they are up-to-date or comprehensive but because they show unwitting evidence of how people outside a particular country see that country's universities.

Just a rough guess, but it looks as if the OU is about as expensive (for overseas students) as a US university would be (for residential students).

Euroculture

Euroculture is part of Erasmus - it's a small networked programme of Masters Level studies in matters European. I originally found out about it when I was surfing the site of Uppsala University, green with envy about the lack of tuition fees in Sweden (but you have to pay a student union fee!). Look at how clear and Euro-friendly this site is btw www.studyinsweden.se


http://www.euroculturemaster.org/default.aspx?sec=3&sub=7 shows the result of some of their work and the main information is here http://www.euroculturemaster.org/

Implications for the O U - well, some kind of Euro-distance learning networked qualification?

Cross border education checklist

The UNESCO site contains a lot of information about the internationalization of higher education (and also has information on the whole international higher education 'industry' such as this example http://www.unesco.org/iau/conferences/Mexico2009/pdf/list.pdf).

In 2006, the International Association of Universities (and others) drew up a checklist concerning the delivery of higher education across borders http://www.unesco.org/iau/internationalization/pdf/cross_border_checklist.pdf

The bit on fees is interesting:

Cross-border higher education
should be accessible not only to
students who can afford to pay,
but also to qualified students with
financial need.