Remarks by ACE President David Ward at OECD/US Forum on Trade in Educational Services

May 23–24, 2002
Washington, DC

I represent the American Council on Education (ACE), a membership organization of both higher education institutions and higher education associations in the United States.

I come to this position as a former college chancellor. I also am an immigrant to the United States, now a citizen, who graduated with degrees in geography. I was engaged in international education through the International Geographic Union and later in the development of an International Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Therefore, I have long been in the trenches of international education and am now very much involved in a membership organization that, frankly, has considerable anxieties about the implications of the current GATS negotiations for public and not-for-profit higher education institutions. Let me explain why this anxiety exists.

To begin with, I think there has been more change in the internal structure, the management, and the service delivery of higher education worldwide in the last 15 years than in the preceding several centuries. These changes in revenues and outputs are often unrecognized and undocumented and involve the inter-penetration of a public good with market behavior and a new balance between bureaucratic allocation and entrepreneurial activities.

When trade issues are connected to the delivery of higher education at a time of extensive and often market-driven changes, there will obviously be great suspicion and anxiety about a new set of changes that are not fully understood. In particular, we are puzzled when government entities would like to be less involved in our lives domestically, but now want in a sense to re-enter our lives internationally. There is a paradox there that we need to understand.

Earlier speakers have provided effective and illuminating arguments about the transparency of GATS negotiations. These negotiations were not, however, very well-known among ACE member representatives, many of whom are endowed with degrees in economics and international studies. If the average U.S. college president does not fully understand these negotiations, it may be a failure of my organization to fully explain it. Then again, ACE did not always fully understand the content and process of negotiations. The transparency of what is going on has not been as clear as it has been made out to be by earlier speakers. I think this event is a great beginning in breaking down our anxieties and making possible the transparency we desperately need. I am an internationalist. I am committed to the freedom of trade and the freedom of movement of people and ideas but negotiations on these issues must include representative organizations of higher education. I hope that this forum is a productive beginning in that direction.

There also is some confusion about the relationship of internationalization of higher education to quality control in higher education. The impact of the quality management movement on higher education or on public entities in general has increased dramatically over the last decade. If what we demand as one of our outcomes is high quality, then I believe there are ways to achieve that goal apart from trade negotiations. If it is increased quality for the consumer that most concerns us, then there are many ways to achieve that end other than through trade negotiations. If increased quality is the motive and purpose of the negotiations, then we should sit down and address the problem of quality, not just, in effect, to see high quality as an attribute of trade.

As someone who has been on the ground of a university with 4,000 foreign students, well over 5,000 students studying abroad, and a significant proportion of the faculty either foreign-born or foreign-trained, I am unsure of the problems that are interrupting internationalization. As I look at my member institutions, as I think about study abroad, as I think about the presence of foreign students at U.S. institutions (some of whom, like myself, remain but many of whom go to other countries or return to their homeland), as I look at collaboration in developing higher education institutions abroad through partnerships between institutions in the United States, Europe, Australia, and other countries, and as I look at the somewhat uneven progress of distance education through e-learning, none of these seems to have insurmountable obstacles that may require redress through trade negotiations.

I do need to know exactly what the problem that we are attempting to solve is. For example, career colleges, which do not give degrees but may give diplomas or certificates in specific training areas, may well have problems that can be addressed through trade discussions. I do understand that problem. That is not, however, a problem for not-for-profit higher education. Nondegree training is different from the products of higher education. Therefore, if training, in a very specific vocational and professional way, has problems in international delivery, then that should be the problem addressed. If there are problems of access and problems of quality in those areas, then it seems to me that we can be very precise about that and deal with it appropriately. The lack of specificity about the kinds of educational services to be included in the GATS negotiations remains unclear.

I was impressed by Mr. Papovitch's sensitive discussion of the anxieties of higher education. It is a positive reflection of a dialogue that will continue. Together with others in ACE, I have met with Mr. Papovitch and his ability to address our issues is a source of gratification to me because it indicates a process of communication which I think is going to be necessary to this discussion. This will be true not only in the United States, but also, I suspect, in Canada, the E.U. countries, and elsewhere in the world, where the constituent elements of higher education are indeed in dialogue with their governments.

I hope that the status of public higher education in the GATS negotiations will be clarified, specifically that they recognize that states in this country and in many other countries control higher education. States have differential tuition rates and promote different higher education policies. There are competitive issues between states and this federal structure becomes clear as you look at the way different states are investing in higher education to promote economic growth. Higher education is the key to full participation in the knowledge economy. There are, therefore, already internal competitive state policies in U.S. higher education apart from external international competition.

Accreditation is another issue that higher education could and will address independently without GATS involvement. Accreditation involves not only quality issues but, ultimately, capacity issues, too. A major problem in higher education relates to the autonomy of institutions. Accreditation protects this autonomy by providing quality control in the transfer of credits but, clearly, credit transfer remains cumbersome and often frustrating to students whose coursework is necessarily completed at several institutions. The capacity problem and the transferability issues need to be resolved by higher education organizations. Thus, while accreditation and quality control are very important issues, they have been developed in the United States by nongovernmental agencies, whereas elsewhere they are state-mandated. The GATS negotiations will need to recognize these differences and be sensitive to the public-private structure of U.S. higher education, which is its special strength. I am sure many of us would like a more fluid transferability of qualifications throughout the European Union and within the OECD and Third World countries, but is GATS the means to achieve that goal?

The final point I would like to make is that higher education is also part of the cultural fabric of nation-states, as well as a vehicle for the international exchange of ideas. Most national educational systems were created for cultural as well as economic purposes. Therefore, as we deal with the growing international marketplace of higher education, sensitivity to different cultures is something that is extremely important. Cultural and national sensibilities are often mistaken and underestimated when we deal with globalization. There are going to be nuances in curricular content that trade negotiations cannot address.

Culture, as well as economy and technology, is involved in how the world fits together. That is what higher education tries to reveal to its students. We need to understand that what we are dealing with is not only career structures based on technical courses, but also, frequently, a degree package including general education requirements with some nationally or culturally specific elements.

I am, however, delighted that this conference has opened a full discussion of these issues. I think the misunderstandings that exist between higher education institutions and their governments over the inclusion of educational services in the GATS negotiations require further deliberation. We do need better information and more transparency about the international delivery of higher education. The consumer needs clearer awareness of quality and transferability. I think we need to build on the Lisbon Convention, which was a new initiative to create a system for the recognition of accrediting agencies. In terms of the broad, integrated, international schema of degree-granting higher education, however, I am not at all convinced that I understand what the problem is that GATS promises to fix. The joint declaration of European, Canadian, and U.S. higher educational associations was an initial effort to raise issues that may now be addressed. I must, however, end by stressing that it is still not altogether clear to most ACE members precisely what problem is to be solved by the GATS negotiations.

Thank you very much.

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