Part II: Is Higher Education A Scam?

A couple of days after writing the original essay on “Is Higher Education A Scam?”, it occurred to me as an after-thought that I had missed quite an important factor contributing to the concern about exorbitant tuition fees from top universities. I aim to cover these points in this essay.

Higher Education as a Source of Immigration

Most of the top universities are linked with top industries in developed nations. Students from all over the world, especially from developing nations, see the degrees offered by these universities as an opportunity to get into their dream industries. The improvement in standard of living offered by the developed nations also remains as a strong attraction beside the technical aspects. Naturally, there are countries and universities that promote exploiting this “market”, by charging high fees for the degrees that they have to offer. The United States and the United Kingdom are particularly well known for their preposterous fee structures.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

The Effect Immigration Throttling

Over the recent years, countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have been facing political heat with respect to immigration, and have decided to cut down on their ‘openness’ to accept new immigrants. What this means for aspiring students who come over is that their options are limited after their studies are completed. They have to be either extremely good to secure an employment within a short time-frame or they have to pack their bags and head home. Doesn’t that sound like a bad deal for a prospective student?

Indeed other countries are stepping up to take advantage of this situation in the “market”. Germany, for instance, has been offering more attractive fee structures for immigrant students, and is aiming to secure a good future for its skilled-labour market in the process. Other European countries are following suit. As they say, what’s one man’s loss is another man’s gain. As for the students, as long as the dream lives on, there will continue to exist a strong global market for immigration-focused higher education.

Brain-drain

Naturally, what this all means for countries from which the students emigrate from is that they are losing valuable talent. This arbitrage cannot last forever, and countries like India have been clawing back on lost ground, and have managed to slow down brain-drain.  I’ve already covered India’s particular case with respect to brain-drain in this previous article: How India Started Dominating The Skilled Labour Market.

Reverse Brain-drain

The next phase that I foresee happening in this context is a reversal of brain-drain. For higher education degrees that require a lot of hands-on training like medicine or mechanical engineering, online education has its limitations. The universities in developing nations will be presented with a unique opportunity to offer these degrees at extremely competitive prices, thereby creating an education value arbitrage in comparison to the universities in developed nations. There are already trace-cases of this happening all over the world.

In other words, what goes around comes around.

I hope you found this article interesting and useful. If you’d like to get notified when interesting content gets published here, consider subscribing.