Criação de carreira

Building a Career

1.1. About business: The education business

Discussion

1. In small groups, discussion the questions below.

a. What difference does a degree course cost in your earning potential?

b. How much does a degree course cost in your country?

c. How much does it cost a university to provide a degree course?

d. Who should pay for higher education?

e. Should students from richer families pay more than those from poorer ones?

f. How can universities persuade students to pay higher fees?

Scan reading

2. Read What price a degree? Opposite and indentify which points in Exercise 1 are discussed.

Reading for detail

3. Read the article again and choose the best answer to each question.

1) Which education policies have caused unrest across the word?

a- wider access

b- lower subsidies

c- wider access and lower subsidies

2) How much does the UK government contribute towards the cost of a degree?

a- around £100,000

b- between £50,000 and £100,000

c- less than £50,000

3) How do scholarships appear to favour students from wealthy families?

a- they are better prepared

b- they have equal opportunities

c- they can pay for awards

4) What evidence suggests that the social benefits of education do not justify their cost?

a- taxpayers have other resources

b-taxpayers have other agendas

c- taxpayers have other benefits

5) Why midnight universities show a preference for foreign students?

a- they accept larger classes

b- They exclude deserving locals

c- They accept higher fees

6) Why don’t private business schools need to increase class sizes or cut faculty pay?

a- They can justify higher fess

b- They have no subsidies

c- They have resisted increases

Listening and Discussion

4. 1:01 – 1:04 Listen to four students reacting to the article. Match each speaker 1 – 4 with the correct summary a-d.

a) Education should be for all

b) Universities are obsolete

c) Let market forces decide

d) Reserve universities for the elite

What price a degree?

Take a random sample of views on higher education in almost any country in the world and you’ll find that almost everyone believes that sending as many young people to university as possible is a good thing. What’s more difficult to agree on is who should pay. The debate is a controversial one: cuts in higher education funding have sparked unrest in many countries across the world, including Austria, Germany, Chile, Colombia and the UK. Protests in the form of strikes, demonstrations and even riots prove that people are willing to go to great lengths to defend their right to higher education.

Widening access to a university education is an admirable political goal, but the uncomfortable truth is that governments simply do not have the resources to match their ambitions.

Faced with this reality, many believe that universities should be paid for by those who get the most benefit from them: graduates. Certainly, a rough cost-benefit analysis suggests that students get good value for their money. A recent UK report estimates that the real cost of a degree is in the region of £100,000. Under the latest system, the average graduate will pay back no more than half that, and only start to pay if and when their annual earnings are more than double the minimum wage.

However, others feel that this system favours students from well-off families, who can put the prospect of paying off such a sum into perspective. For bright but poorer teenagers from working-class families, taking on such enormous debt is a mountain to climb. Even the scholarships that are intended to offer equal opportunities are mostly awarded to students who have benefited from special coaching at expensive private schools.

If graduates themselves don’t pay, then responsibility falls to the taxpayer. Thus, a majority of taxpayers, mostly earning significantly less than graduates, end up paying for a minority of students, many of whom will go on to become comfortably wealthy. Now, robbing the poor to pay the rich might be justified, as long as it can be proved that the overall benefits of education to society are greater than its costs. However, the trend towards cuts in education budgets across the world points unmistakeably to the fact that the ordinary taxpayer does not see the benefits to society, and would rather see public money spent elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the question of who should pay has been exacerbated by a dramatic rise in the costs of providing higher education. Despite a growing cross-border market for education, competition and new delivery models like e-learning have failed to cap universities’ spiraling costs. Whether governments continue to provide subsidies or not, and in spite of massive hikes in students fees, university revenues remain significantly lower than their costs. This presents universities with new dilemmas. Should they try to cut costs by having larger classes and less experienced faculty? Should they increase fees further? And should they offer more places to higher-paying foreign students, at the risk of excluding deserving locals?

Intriguingly, private business schools do not