THAT the World Trade Organisation is to hold trade talks on education must be nauseous for the academic community because when one thinks of trade negotiations, it is either bananas or beef or steel that come to mind. Not education.
But a number of countries have already put the classroom on the agenda of the World Trade Organisation simply because education is fast emerging as one of the world’s most vibrant and growing businesses.
The United States, Australia and New Zealand have submitted proposals for the next round of WTO talks on services which are due to be completed by the end of next year. These proposals aim at making it easier for private universities to expand across borders without any obstacle and for students to move more freely overseas to choose their university. Australia has complained that certain countries have put restrictions on foreign ownership of private educational institutions and have adopted discouraging visa requirements, thus making free trade in education difficult.
It is ironic to note that education has already become a lucrative trade item the world over ever since it slipped out of the public universities and went into the hands of the entrepreneurs to serve their unholy objectives. For the upcoming generation, it is hardly a “pursuit of learning and knowing”. By and large, now it is a part of free market system and no more a public good. The OECD puts the global market for “educational services” at about 30 billion dollars which is slightly less than the worldwide market for “financial services.”
And in Pakistan, education market is already worth Rs 25 billion per annum, having the highest profitability rate of about 50 per cent exceeding oil and gas sector which has 40 per cent profitability rate and has so far been one of the top businesses, according to an official report.
The WTO talks are meant to deal only with private education and there is a consensus that state-owned universities should not be touched. But the line between private and public is fast becoming blurred in the wake of growing trend of partnerships between private companies and public universities, especially in the area of research.
In many countries, some public schools are becoming dependent on private companies for meeting their ever-growing financial needs. For instance, Coco-Cola is running “extensive reading programmes” in many US schools and Wal-Mart, world’s largest retailer, offers funds for items ranging from books for libraries to playground construction. (There had been a severe backlash as well: Los Angeles district has decided to kick out Coco-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and other soft drinks from schools falling under its jurisdiction and allow only water, juice and sports drink in vending machines).
According to a report in ‘International Herald Tribune’, the largest “exporters” of education at present are the United States, Britain and Australia. These countries are active in both attracting students to their own campuses as well as opening campuses abroad where they are doing roaring business, particularly in computer science. What they sell abroad apart from education are the dreams of a successful career in dot.com business.
In Pakistan, there has been a mushroom growth of such campuses in major cities and one can see many of these operating in residential buildings in Karachi’s Clifton and Defence localities. However, receiving or “importing” foreign students is a much more lucrative business because the host country profits from tuition, living expenses and travel on a scale sometimes more than the big-spending tourists.
For New Zealand, “educational services” have grown to become the fourth largest revenue earner for its service sector. Now, it wants all restrictions to end on student recruitment and reduction of barriers on trade in education but its government spokesmen insist, though apologetically, that its education trade does not, in any manner, lead to an erosion of core public education system and standards.
The proposals put at the WTO agenda have become very controversial and are being stiffly resisted by student organisations and NGOs from Europe which say it is not up to trade negotiators in Geneva to decide how the Third World countries should educate their youth. The European Commission which negotiates on behalf of the European Union recently ruled out any deal on education in the upcoming trade round.
However, according to the IHT report, one reason why Europe is not proposing to further open its educational sector is because it has already liberalized it considerably. During the last round of service sector trade talks in 1994, the EU made commitments to open its markets for private primary, secondary and tertiary education — a move not yet taken up by the United States or Japan.
Under the WTO system, countries negotiate packages: The United States, for example, might agree to remove barriers to its educational market if Europe agrees to liberalize its transport sector.
Asia is also a major growth area for the education market. Many countries have opened their doors in the past decade to university “twinning programmes” and other cross-border initiatives. China, a newcomer to the WTO, is pursuing a very open policy on educational services and allows foreign universities to operate in the country as long as they agree to partner with a local university.
Many education exporters from the US, Britain, Australia and Singapore have been establishing partnerships with Pakistani educational enterprises and offering attractive study courses which carry foreign degrees and also a facility of completing half of the semesters in the exporters’ countries.
In the West, particularly in Europe, some NGOs have initiated campaigns against treating education as a business. One such NGO, People and Planet, is now leading a drive against the WTO initiatives saying “there are certain social objectives that make higher education different from hairdressing... Education is a public good and it must remain a public good.” Other NGOs are opposed to mixing trade talks with education and insist that the notion of quality may badly suffer worldwide if education was treated as a commodity in the forthcoming WTO talks.