Addressing equity and resilience in the wake of COVID-19

Last year, roughly 222 million students were enrolled in formal post-secondary education around the world, more than doubling the 100 million student enrolment figure from 2000. It is estimated that there will be 377.4 million students by 2030, an increase of 281% over the 30 years from 2000 to 2030, surpassing the growth between 1970 and 2000.

This growth can be attributed to many factors, including expanded access programmes, an increase in the number of providers (both public and private) and greater information on the benefits of achieving post-secondary education, but the simplest answer to the question of why we are seeing such growth is that more students than ever are moving through the education pipeline – from primary to secondary and to graduation. More students than ever are prepared to continue their studies after secondary education.

Almost three-quarters of the expected global growth for the population aged 18 to 23 from 2015 to 2035 will be concentrated in 10 countries: Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda and Tanzania.

With so much of this growth set to occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is an even greater imperative to expand investments and opportunities in the tertiary education sectors across the region to maximise the relevant outcomes that advanced skills and research bring to individuals and societies.

Rapid and continuing youth population growth presents a stark challenge for all the aforementioned countries and, genuinely, all governments and tertiary education institutions around the world, particularly in their ability to anticipate and respond to social, political and economic needs in the decades to come.

Promoting tertiary education as a means of addressing key strategic and policy imperatives requires ensuring that tertiary education is suitable for and adaptable to local and global needs.

Within this context of massive growth and the pressures faced by every government to build a knowledge society to contribute toward – and benefit from – the global knowledge economy, the World Bank continues to refine its frameworks for advising countries on how to assess their sectors and design and invest in reforms.

The World Bank’s work in tertiary education

Since 2015, the World Bank has funded more than US$9 billion in investments in tertiary education reforms, making us the largest external financial supporter of the sector globally.

We have been working on a position paper to provide a simple guide for both internal and client dialogues on how to focus their reform efforts, broken into five main categories: a strategic systems approach, equity, resilience, effectiveness and technology. I will focus on the first three.

As systems move from elite to mass participation, they serve more heterogeneous clienteles as they include more students drawn from more segments of the population. Input demands multiply, extending the tasks of teaching and increasing the congruences that must be fashioned if individual desires and institutional capabilities are to mesh.

Tertiary systems are in constant motion – adapting and evolving to changes in their environment and their clientele. A strategically diversified and flexible tertiary education system is vital for creating the variety of interwoven pathways crucial to meeting the needs of society.

An indispensable tool for expanded access and effective learning is the creation and strengthening of a range of post-secondary institutions such as community colleges, polytechnic institutions and technical training institutions – with public and private; online and in person; short-course, certification and full-degree options – all of which are part of one single ecosystem, together with universities.

Tertiary education systems are characterised and distinguished in multiple ways, including:

• By the issues these systems try to address, such as access and equity, employability, innovation and the role universities play in regional development;

• By the diversity of mission (the balance between teaching and research, the student populations they serve, their relationship with their local community and labour market, etc) and forms of institutional delivery, serving the complex needs of complex societies;

• By the roles of different actors such as learners, academics, higher education institutions, ministries and families;

• By key instruments like governance and management, financing and quality assurance;

• Through the application of distinct tools and the extent to which they endorse (and drive) new technologies.

For students and scholars in North America, this model is pretty familiar, having been in place for more than 100 years in some states and provinces or territories. In other countries, the presence and respect for non-university tertiary institutions such as polytechnics, further education colleges and training institutes also signify comfort with diversity in the post-secondary sector.

Students of all ages and levels of preparation have an access point to continue their education within this diverse ecosystem of post-secondary opportunities. For much of the world, however, non-university tertiary education is still minimally developed. And everywhere in the world, there are value judgements made regarding the credentials provided by non-university tertiary education institutions.

Changing how cultures value non-university post-secondary learning will be as vital as improving financing and strategic leadership and planning. There is no doubt, however, that this move must take place, to absorb the students seeking post-secondary learning and credentials and ensure that the outcomes from that learning are relevant and sustained for the broadest cohort of students and the diverse needs of society. Such diversity of stakeholders and outcomes leads to a focus on equity.

Committing to equity

A national valuation of social justice – fair treatment for all – is pressed upon modern academic systems as a set of issues of equality and equity, first for students and second by faculty, other staff, enterprises and sectors for themselves.

With respect to students, equality is taken to consist, in ascending order of stringency, of equality of opportunity in the sense of access, equality of opportunity in the sense of treatment once admitted and equality of outcome or reward.

To date, tertiary education expansion has not meant equitable access, even in diversified systems. When systems expand access, the immediate beneficiaries have come from the upper socio-economic groups (and globally, expansion has occurred in the wealthiest countries).

More than anything, these first waves of increased access have largely been a case of finding study places for students who would have been unable to access tertiary education due to a lack of space, not a lack of preparation or connections.

And while students from all economic quintiles have been accessing tertiary education in greater numbers – all boats are being lifted as it were, but some boats are just bigger than others – this predominance of enrolment by the wealthier quintiles, in global and local terms, can actually be seen as having expanded the equity gap instead of closing it.

For policy interventions to work effectively, not only to expand overall numbers but in purposefully closing the equity gap, issues of equity and inclusion must be addressed across three key vertical dimensions: access and enrolment, retention or persistence, and completion and successful transition to postgraduate engagement (for example, further studies, employment or entrepreneurial activities).

Access

Examples of measures that have proven effective include: outreach programmes of information and financial support targeted towards high achievers from disadvantaged groups from an early age and well before upper secondary; better and more easily accessible information on study options, career prospects and earning potential; fair and equitable selection and admission procedures; better links between admission and the needs of students and the labour market; and low costs of changing study paths later on; and strong collaboration among schools.

Retention and creating effective learning environments for at-risk students can be addressed through interventions such as remedial opportunities for students admitted based on potential but lacking in the preparatory development and skills to succeed in the intensity of post-secondary education; expanded information sharing and outreach from the earliest stages of education; accessibility of premises and learning materials; flexibility of provision; bridge programmes; adaptation of course design; academic and psychosocial guidance; learning laboratories and tutoring to support extracurricular academic development; and counselling and targeted financial support.

Horizontal equity considerations (ie distribution of students across the breadth of academic fields and institutions) must also anchor interventions designed to expand opportunities for all who wish to access them and promote the outcomes sought by graduates, particularly with regard to labour market outcomes that can be evaluated and understood via tools such as graduate tracer studies and labour market forecasting efforts.

Equity policies must consider not just improvements in the number of enrolled students but must also promote access to every possible field of study, especially those most valued by the job market, and support all students towards completing their degree programmes.

Resilience for equity

The transition to online delivery of teaching and learning has exacerbated existing equity concerns and introduced new ones. Tertiary education students who did not have access to adequate resources were confronted by a ‘digital divide’, which worsened existing inequalities. Tertiary education systems in some regions were more successful than others in the transition.

It is worth noting, however, that internet access is only one consideration in mitigating disparities in online delivery. Reliability, speed and affordability are critical factors for a virtual academic experience, among many others, and organisations have voiced their concerns about the online transition.

The Association of African Universities signalled that, among the 700 universities operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, very few were well-prepared and sufficiently equipped to deliver their programmes online. Connectivity remains an issue, and in some countries of the region, governments have difficulties guaranteeing continuity in power supply.

Further, inequities tend to be interconnected. As such, students who were (or became) vulnerable due to the online transition likely faced other disadvantages and risks, heightening adverse impacts.

For example, in East Africa, pregnancy rates for girls in late secondary and tertiary education grew at alarming rates during the pandemic’s closures, likely removing a cohort of talented girls from the tertiary education pipeline, at least for the immediate future.

Broader economic concerns emerge as young people, particularly in households which experience job loss as a result of COVID-19, may decide to drop out from higher education to find work and support their families.

There is a widespread assumption that tertiary education is easily adaptable to remote learning, but why should this be? Students enrolled on relatively well-resourced campuses – fully equipped with technology and infrastructure – return home to the same neighbourhoods as their primary and secondary school neighbours. For many places, there is insufficient infrastructure and homes lack the hardware and connectivity for distance learning.

Moreover, tertiary education is a largely bespoke endeavour, where students craft their academic calendar according to their interests and fields of study and where the quality and opportunities are driven by research infrastructure and direct interactions between research and teaching.

Such academic work cannot be delivered by radio or television, unlike at earlier stages of education. Online and distance learning forced massive adaptation for tertiary education institutions regarding how information and coursework are delivered, strongly impacting how (and whether) students learn.

There is, however, an implicit bias in this move, which assumes and requires a level of technical capacity, hardware and infrastructure that is simply not the reality for students around the world.

Digital infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, reaches only about 34% of the population, and in many countries on the continent, the rate is much lower.

University campuses are also the technology hubs – loss of one often meant the loss of both.

Instead of allowing for broadscale learning continuity, the move to remote learning left millions of students without any accessible options for continuing their studies after leaving their campuses, widening the achievement gap between these students and the students with the means to keep studying.

As evidenced by the pandemic response experience, the focus on reforms for tertiary systems and institutions must include resilience planning at the highest levels – especially for equity challenges.

For a social sector system like education, systems resilience can be defined as (1) the capacity of an enterprise to survive, adapt and grow in the face of turbulent change; and (2) the capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining essentially the same function, structure, feedbacks, and, therefore, identity.

Both definitions are relevant to tertiary education systems, which need not simply ‘survive, adapt and grow in the face of change’ but, as COVID-19 proved all too clearly, must also know their essential functions and identities (missions and stakeholder communities) in order to sustain those when faced with transformative shocks.

Tertiary education systems and institutions must embrace agile frameworks that promote using the shock as an opportunity for reflection, assessment and evolution in order to maintain commitment to their essential function and identity; that is, there must be adaptation without capitulation.

As the history of tertiary education has shown, universities and colleges are among the most resilient institutions on the planet, because their value and function remain essential to society.

Separating the signal from the noise

What role will tertiary education play in promoting a more equitable world? The university remains one of the most venerated and yet simultaneously vilified institutions in modern society.

Every country holds its institutions of higher learning in genuine esteem – aspiring to attend, respecting the academic (and administrative) profession, enjoying the cultural benefits of living in proximity to these beautiful and almost mysterious places where knowledge is created and merit is valued.

And yet: universities are a battleground of every generation’s culture war – do they indoctrinate; do they give advantages to those least in need while exacerbating equity gaps; are they even necessary; should the public pay for them? This is the paradox in which we all work and live as we pursue our careers and aspirations in higher education.

In this lingering pandemic and the uncertainty that has destabilised so much of our lives and routines, the rhetoric around the future of tertiary education has exploded, in large part because these opinions and editorials do not require research and data to promote, nor is there any accountability.

Comparing universities to DVD rental stores or CD players, etc, is as if their obsolescence is imminent. But in the day-to-day work with countries around the world, it is clear to me that nothing particularly dramatic looms in the foreseeable future.

The signals seem fairly optimistic. First, tertiary education is not in a crisis globally, no matter how many editorials are written about this; there is no new world order for post-secondary education on the horizon.

Higher learning institutions have been around in some form for nearly 1,000 years and have been the creators of as much innovation as any other sector could claim.

It is worth noting that, despite physical shutdowns of university campuses across the world, universities contributed perhaps the most impactful outcome to end the pandemic: the University of Oxford developed a vaccine using data published on the genome of the coronavirus by a Chinese virologist at Fudan University.

This vaccine is the centrepiece of COVAX, the global vaccine initiative which cites equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for low- to middle-income countries as its goal.

Support for university reforms is only growing and at a very rapid pace. There are institutions in the United States that are in dire crisis – but the pandemic has only magnified existing issues at some institutions.

Small, private liberal arts colleges dependent on tuition fees have been closing at rapid rates for the past few decades, and while we mourn the loss of their contributions to the diversity of the sector, the agile higher education marketplace in the US means students decide if these colleges remain valuable. Some evolve and adapt, some don’t. It’s academic Darwinism.

Globally, however, closing institutions is not the trend. On the contrary, higher education institutions are exploding in number and diversity of structures and programmes around the world. Demand for study places is increasing, and the market is responding.

Countries need to focus on quality assurance and regulatory frameworks to manage this explosion of institutions; few are concerned about having too many.

Next, digitalisation and technology will not solve equity challenges for a generation (or more). No matter what you are reading about the transformative power of technology in higher education, it will not be solving the equity challenges students face in achieving tertiary education.

Technology is expensive and already a barrier for lower income students. Infrastructure (reliable electricity, ease of accessing clean water and physical space) is as important as technology in remote delivery of education, and the world’s poor (even in its wealthiest countries) simply do not have the infrastructure to benefit from the wonders of digitalisation and remote learning, not without massive economies of scale to significantly drive down costs to the beneficiaries.

Finally, not enough attention is being paid to students – what they want and how they learn. Pundits and policy-makers seem to be speaking for students a lot, using anecdotes to represent wholesale demands to be made on their behalf. COVID-19 has made this even noisier.

In higher education programmes, student development theory, when offered at all as a course, is often separated entirely from education policy programmes. Some of the loudest noise in the field of international higher education is about the student experience, and yet so little is based on actual research.

What we hear when we speak with students around the world in our stakeholder-driven work is that traditional-age students want to live with fellow students (on or off campus), they want to learn with each other inside and outside of the classroom. Those needs and values change depending on the student cohort being assessed – married students, fully employed students, older students, etc, will have different needs and require different support.

A more equal world can be best supported by equitable higher education systems that centre their activities around ensuring students have access to and support through the academic programme they choose, no matter when in life they have the opportunity.

Moreover, authorities in a position to constrain the agility of the system to slide over the long run and respond to the needs of all its students would do well to recognise the value of these diversified, articulated and valuable systems that offer a place to as many students as might wish to seek it.

In his book The Higher Education System, Burton R Clark wrote about how higher education systems support diversity in experience and values, to serve students throughout their educational journey.

He wrote: “Among their institutions, systems can and do proliferate institutional types, arrange the types in functional and status hierarchies and make permeable the boundaries between the sectors so that students can move from one to another in search of different types and levels of training. Diversification is the key to how higher education systems affect compromises among the plurality of insistent values.”

Roberta Malee Bassett is global lead for tertiary education at the World Bank, where she leads reform efforts addressing issues such as equity and inclusion; finance, governance and quality assurance; internationalisation; research, innovation and competitiveness; skills and outcomes; and remote delivery and learning. This is an edited version of her Burton R Clark Lecture at this week’s Centre for Global Higher Education annual conference (11-12 May), “Tertiary Education Systems and Diversification: Adapting the wisdom of Burton Clark in promoting effective and inclusive reforms around the world”.

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions in this lecture belong to Roberta Malee Bassett and do not represent an official position of the World Bank.