January 23, 2008 ––Imagine education in 2020. Going to college is compulsory. New students are routinely recruited on MySpace and Facebook. And each freshman gets his or her own laptop or BlackBerry.

Instead of going to campus every day, students take all their courses and exams on the Internet. If they need any academic advice, they interact with an online tutor or ring a call center overseas.

Once they graduate, however, their degree would be valid for only five years, forcing them to constantly update their skills and knowledge.

Sounds like the setting of a science fiction novel? Not according to Jamil Salmi, the World Bank’s tertiary education coordinator.

“Some of these are real cases that I have observed during my trips around the world,” said Salmi, who has advised governments in more than 40 countries on reforming higher education. “They symbolize the radical transformation that higher education is going through.”

Knowledge Will Rule the Labor Market

This transformation is driven not only by the changing needs of the students, but also of their future employers. In this increasingly globalized world, knowledge is fast replacing physical resources and cheap labor as the driver of growth.

Advances in technology are changing the way people work and live, and economic growth depends increasingly on innovation, planning, technology and management—skills only available from a highly educated work force.

As knowledge becomes more important, so does higher education, said the World Bank in its 2002 report on constructing knowledge societies. In today’s world economy, workers need not just a college degree in a specific subject.

They also need to be resourceful, skillful, and able to quickly identify and solve problems. These strengths can only be cultivated in quality universities at the center of first-class higher education systems.

“Countries need to educate more of their young people to a higher standard—a degree is now a basic requirement for many skilled jobs,” said Salmi. “The quality of knowledge generated within higher education institutions, and its availability to the wider economy, is becoming increasingly critical to national competitiveness.”

Asia Takes Note

Last month, 17 Asian countries came together in Kuala Lumpur during a three-day regional conference on higher education. Representatives of these countries shared the experiences and the lessons learned, and sought each others’ opinions on dealing with the difficult higher education reform at home.  The conference was co-hosted by Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education and the World Bank.

The conferees understood the developmental imperative to get education right.  “We don’t want to be a developing country forever,” said Sohail Naqvi, the executive director of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission. “And getting [to a higher status] requires the improvement of our abundant resources that are our human capital."

These sentiments were echoed by government officials and university administrators from across the region—from conflict-driven Afghanistan to robust Malaysia, to the region’s poorest and newly independent Timor-Leste and the fast-growing Vietnam.

How to Get There

“Developing countries that are just beginning to scale up their higher education systems are looking to learn from the experiences of countries that have already done so,” said Emmanuel Jimenez, the director of the Bank’s human development sector in East Asia. 

“But even countries that have achieved middle-income status are realizing that they need to continue the reform process if their workforces are going to be ready to compete in the global economy.”

A number of essential reform measures were identified:

• Management reform to allow universities to be more flexible, creative, entrepreneurial, and respond quickly to the changing training needs
   
• New financing models to allow universities to diversify funding sources and reduce dependence on public financing
   
• More competitive salaries to attract star professors
   
• Teachers made to be more accountable to the students
   
• Increasing university-industry partnership
   
• Quality assurance
  

These steps are not easy—they require departure from government control and strong political leadership to push through. Jimenez reaffirmed the World Bank’s commitment to help countries obtain the necessary information to make the tough decisions, and then carry out the even more difficult task of reforms.

“We can help you through a number of programs and analytic work. We can help facilitate learning that needs to take place across countries,” Jimenez said on the last day of the conference.

“The World Bank is not a repository of experts on higher education. What we can do is to convene those experts together to help. We are also the link between you and the ministry that holds the purse strings. And we hope we can bridge that gap.”