为什么高等教育市场不遵循经济学教科书

Why Markets in Higher Education Do Not Follow the Economics Textbooks

自20世纪80年代中期以来,全世界范围内接连出现的政府主导的改革将高等教育系统向“教科书般”经济市场越推越近已实施的改革包括公司化、引入竞争性资助、增加学费和其它费用、使用高校管理中产出模式和绩效报告但是,没有一个国家面向本国学生的第一学位教育是按照真正的资本主义经济市场来运作的,没有研究型大学的发展是被股东、利润、市场份额、配里效率或商品形式所驱动的。在一些国家,只有职业培训和国际敉育才会真正收取商业性质的学费虽然高等教育中普遍存在激烈的竞争、企业家精神和消费者话语,但资本主义在其中没有一席之地;现有的高等教育市场充其量是一个受监管的准市场在许多国家,高等教育领域的“市场改革”不同于交通、通信、广播电视和医疗保险界的私有化和商业化。究其原因,本文发现真正的市场改革受制于高等教育领域特定的内在限度(公共产品、地位竞争)以及与这限度相关的政治因素高等教育市场改革计划在本质上是乌托邦式的,目前市场改革的抽象理想仍在持续并不是因为它具有真正实现的前景,而是由于外源性政策的推动(如财政缩减、政府控制等)如果资本主义市场是无法实现的,为什么要继续假装它们可以实现呢?我们需要一个与教育系统更适切的现代化改革议程。

Since the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, successive government-led reforms around the world have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. The reforms that have been implemented have included corporatization, the introduction of competitive funding, increased student tuition fees and other charges, and the use of output formats to administer institutions, and performance reporting. However, no country has established a bona fide capitalist economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocation efficiency or the commodity form. There are genuine commercial tuition arrangements only in parts of vocational training and in international education in some countries. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship, and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not. At the most what we have is regulated quasi-markets, as in the UK system following the 2010 Brown reforms. This experience of “market reform" in higher education differs from the experience of privatization and commercialization of transport , communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. This article asks ”why is this so?" It finds that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (e. g. public goods and status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that programs of market reform in higher education are essentially utopian, and the abstract ideal of market reform is sustained not because it has real prospects of implementation, but for exogenous policy reasons (e. g. fiscal reduction, state control, and ordering of contents). But if capitalist markets are unachievable, why go on pretending that they are achievable? A more authentic modernization agenda is needed.