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Southern Arizona has developed into a hub of light-based industries but ranks near the bottom third of US cities in per capita income. State funding for education is in decline, accentuated by the economic crisis, and the public good of tertiary education is under threat. In a time of financial stringency, how can the University of Arizona and community colleges preserve their existing strengths and address the needs of the diverse population? How can the region and its tertiary education institutions fuel local growth and create high quality jobs and new businesses? How can the institutions prepare for the post-crisis economy and help diversify the economy? This publication is part of a series of reviews that help mobilise higher education institutions for economic, social and cultural development of cities and regions. They analyse how the higher education system impacts upon regional and local development and bring together universities, other higher education institutions and public and private agencies to identify strategic goals and to work towards them.

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Governments are seeking to channel research funds into universities and other institutions in ways that support high-quality research in strategically important areas and bolster effective knowledge diffusion. These issues of steering and funding have even more relevance in light of the current financial crisis and economic downturn which have seen severe fiscal pressures fall on many countries. This publication presents a collection of papers presented at an OECD workshop on performance-based funding for public research in tertiary education institutions in 2010, as well as a rapporteur's report and workshop summary. It takes stock of current thinking and practice around performance-based funding for public research in tertiary education institutions as a tool to help governments meet their research goals. These funding models are essentially systems of ex-post evaluation of research outputs and outcomes from universities and other tertiary institutions, and are generally based on peer review, bibliometrics or other quantitative indicators. Their results are used to inform government decisions about how much and which institutions to fund. An online annex provides additional detail of the performance-based funding systems in place in Australia, Austria, Belgium (Flemish Community), the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. Show less

This paper concentrates on the role of foreign students' tuition fees in funding tertiary institutions and on the international mobility of students. The number of students enrolled in tertiary education outside their country of citizenship has been steadily increasing over the last 15 years. Some countries attract foreign students on a revenue-generating or at least a cost-recovery basis, while others do not differentiate between the tuition fees paid by national and foreign students. The evidence from recent tuition-fee reforms suggests that tuition fees influence the choice of destination countries among international new entrants. However, higher tuition fees do not necessarily discourage international students, and can contribute substantially to the funding of tertiary education.

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Impressive progress has been made in raising participation in early childhood education as well as tertiary educational attainment over the past 30 years. However, the inflow of poorly educated youth into the labour market is unusually heavy for a high-income country, largely on account of high drop-out rates in lower secondary education which, in turn, reflect one of the highest grade repetition rates in the OECD. The supply of workers with intermediate vocational skills is surprisingly low, despite the high return, in terms of labour market outcomes that these skills offer, even if they have recently deteriorated. There is room to raise learning outcomes up to the end of compulsory school, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), although, owing to a compressed distribution of such outcomes, the share of poorly performing pupils is not unusually large. While significant reforms have been undertaken to address these problems, more measures are needed to reduce grade repetition and raise education outcomes, by improving accountability of schools and school staff, as well as by raising school autonomy further than has already occurred. Vocational training needs to become more attractive. In tertiary education, few Spanish universities have attained a high level of international standing, and scope remains to improve the contribution tertiary attainment can make to gains in economic welfare, notably by reforming funding arrangements.

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Economic and cultural globalisation has ushered in a new era in higher education. Higher education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital. Even as they share in the reinvention of the world around them, higher education institutions, and the policies that produce and support them, are also being reinvented. For the first time in history every research university is part of a single world-wide network and the world leaders in the field have an unprecedented global visibility and power. Research is more internationalised than before and the mobility of doctoral students and faculty has increased. The specifically global element in academic labour markets has gained weight, especially since the advent of global university rankings. This working paper explores the issues for national policy and for individual institutions. Part one provides an overview of globalisation and higher education and the global responses of national systems and individual institutions of higher education. Part two is focused on certain areas of policy with a strong multilateral dimension: Europeanisation, institutional rankings and typologies and cross-border mobility.

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In recent years, the government of Egypt has driven major reforms for modernising the country. However, Egypt’s higher education system has remained largely unchanged and without fundamental reform of the sector the country will face difficulties in improving its competitiveness. This independent review of Egypt’s higher education system focuses on areas in need of attention by policy makers and stakeholders, including system steering and institutional governance; student access to higher education; educational quality and effectiveness; research, development and innovation; and finance. It contains an analysis of the system and valuable recommendations which, taken together, represent a major program of structural and cultural reform of Egyptian higher education over the decade to 2020.

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Better skills policies help build economic resilience, boost employment and reinforce social cohesion. The OECD skills strategy provides countries with a framework to analyse their skills strengths and challenges. Each OECD skills strategy diagnostic report reflects a set of skills challenges identified by broad stakeholder engagement and OECD comparative evidence while offering concrete examples of how other countries have tackled similar skills challenges.

These reports tackle questions such as: How can countries maximise their skills potential? How can they improve their performance in developing relevant skills, activating skills supply and using skills effectively? What is the benefit of a whole-of-government approach to skills? How can governments build stronger partnerships with employers, trade unions, teachers and students to deliver better skills outcomes? OECD skills strategy diagnostic reports provide new insights into these questions and help identify the core components of successful skills strategies. This report [for Peru] is part of the OECD's ongoing work on building effective national skills strategies.

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The State of Victoria is a knowledge-intensive centre for Australia: educational services are Victoria's strongest export worth more than AUD five billion, surpassing tourism and automotive sectors. Victoria is a magnet for immigration and the international student enrolment represents over 30 per cent of the total for Australia. The higher education system in Australia is moving to a more competitive phase with the decision that the government funding will follow students wherever they choose to enroll. How can Victoria continue to increase participation in higher education and widen access to lower socio-economic groups? How can its higher education institutions help transform Victoria into an innovative state with knowledge-intensive industries and jobs? This publication explores a range of helpful policy measures and institutional reforms to mobilise higher education for regional development. It is part of the series of the OECD reviews of Higher Education in Regional and City Development. These reviews help mobilise higher education institutions for economic, social and cultural development of cities and regions. They analyse how the higher education system impacts upon regional and local development and bring together universities, other higher education institutions and public and private agencies to identify strategic goals and to work towards them.

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Higher education institutions (HEIs) have experienced increasing pressures to provide accountability data and consumer information on the quality of teaching and learning. But existing ratings and rankings of HEIs tend to neglect information on student learning outcomes. Instead, they focus on inputs, activities and research outputs, such as resources used, classes taught, and articles published. Such indicators provide no indication of the degree to which HEIs actually develop the knowledge and skills of their students. In most countries, hardly any comparable information is available on the educational quality of different programs and institutions. In some countries, approaches to assess higher education learning outcomes have been developed, but little cross-country information is available on the characteristics of the instruments used. This paper provides an overview of experience gained in this domain across OECD and partner countries. Based on illustrative evidence collected for 18 assessment instruments, it examines conceptual, organisational and methodological aspects of existing assessments. It proposes a typology of higher education learning outcomes and reviews the ways in which these have been assessed across countries. Examples are drawn from Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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Because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, most higher education institutions across the OECD decided to close their campuses. As a result, teaching and assessment activities have been conducted from a distance, generally online. Based on the literature and on the experiences of the international network of higher education institutions participating in the project on Fostering and Assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking of the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), this brief outlines possible short-term and long-term solutions for organising student examinations on line in the context of campus closures and social distancing measures. This policy brief explores the following questions: What are the challenges and solutions to designing and conducting end-of-term examinations on line following campus closures? What new forms of examinations could replace or supplement the mainstream methods in the future?

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