Higher Educating A Nation: Why?

An unlikely comparison but two nations Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the US face the need to increase numbers of their citizens’ completing higher education. As reported in the 13 October edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education, President Obama wants to higher education completion rates of US citizens to hoist the US to the top of countries world wide by 2020 of nations whose citizens complete higher education. At the minimum he would like every American to finish a year or more of higher education.

The PNG national government is also promoting higher education as the key enabler for the achievement of the nation’s recently launched 2050 vision. Higher education providers are thus entreated to response to the national demand to graduate increasing numbers of well qualified graduates for effective economic and social participation to drive PNG towards the 2050 vision of a Middle Income Economy. But here the comparison ends.

President Obama is putting money where his mouth is by channelling huge sums of dollars to schools and colleges so numbers of US citizens completing higher education are increased. Again as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, at issue for US are the low retention rates of college enrolments. By stemming the outflow of students from schools and colleges before completing their programs of study, the US hopes to be able to increase its higher educated manpower levels. President Obama is further matching his demands on college education with more promises of money to states conditional on set of 4 accountability and quality assurances.

 In contrast, PNG’s workforce capacity demand can not be met without institutional capacity expansion.  But, I would argue that there seems little prospect of that happening in any meaningful way without the government increasing its current levels of funding to Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The best advice going to the HEIs is to adopt managerial strategies and knowhow to generate funding to supplement the shortfalls and perhaps maintain current provision and have extra for expansion initiatives.  A number of institutions such as the University of Papua New Guinea and Divine Word University are innovating and supplementing funding levels through entrepreneurial initiatives. But the mantra to be innovative and entrepreneurial is not enough to meet the human resource capacity needs of PNG. Without serious money going to HEIs to expand and increase access, vision 2050 would be just a dream.