Business must work with state to provide equal access to education
Education is valuable. Education is expensive. Education is good business. Worldwide, we just need to find a balance. An education is an essential personal asset, as much as its absence is a liability. An education is not a selective birthright, and it cannot be inherited from your parents. But it can be your passport out of poverty, your ladder out of the dark gutter into the light of prosperity, a licence to earn a living, a foundation for self-respect.
It surely follows that it is in the national interest for all countries to provide the opportunity to be educated to all of its citizens, equally.
The highest quality education is price-elastic, and demand can never be satisfied for the Ivy League universities in the US. The queues to get in are long, the cost is exorbitant and the entrance examinations are difficult. Many parents have been found guilty of being prepared to pay over the odds to get their children in. Beyond the academic education, the alumni networks from highly respected schools are invaluable.
The education economic model has attractive features, which include leverage of teacher-pupil ratios and expansion in products and classes that compound into a geometric progression revenue growth model. All of this comes together in an opportunity to make super-profits out of education, at all levels. If you simply allowed capitalism to have its way, the best teachers would be employed at the best schools, which would have the best facilities and be able to charge pupils whatever they liked (paid for either by parents who could afford it, or by companies only too keen to provide strings-attached scholarships and bursaries to promising future employees).
But that model further entrenches inequality (and/or lowers the quality of apparently equivalent, more affordable qualifications), and arguably does not produce the best overall outcome for a country, no matter how smart or well qualified the elite graduates turn out to be.
China is having none of this. The FT Weekend ran a piece last Sunday, based on a leaked memo, that suggested Beijing may ban academic tutors from making a profit. Although this related to growth in profitable home-schooling, in the wake of Covid, the valuation of three major listed education companies dropped by $16bn (R235bn).
Normally, I would argue strongly against taking away the profit motive, on the basis that doing so removes the very economic incentive that attracts the most capable to become teachers. But education has to be treated differently. Participation has to be broadly based to fulfil the skills base necessary for a fully functional economy. If ever there was a case for finding an access-for-everybody model, this must be it.
As ever, the solution lies not with either/or but with a sustainable combination of both. The role of the state, as funder and regulator, is paramount. The private sector has a huge vested interest.
Everybody must have access to the best education a country can offer, regardless of whether individuals can afford it personally, or have access to a student loan, or qualify for an academic bursary or other forms of financial assistance. At some point, though, there has to be a merit filter, beyond which extraordinary reserves can be applied disproportionally to evidenced talent and application. Equality of result is not the objective here, but equality of opportunity must be enshrined. The competition for talented people across all fields of endeavour is not limited to the local market. Our best will be lured offshore if we can’t provide solutions for them here. We are already importing lesser skills than we could (and have) produced locally.
Business and government must set aside differences, cross the confidence and trust divides and craft a joint solution. We can have the best of both worlds — we don’t have a choice.