In Brief

Making a higher education financing system work that seeks to recoup a significant part of the investment in higher education from individual beneficiaries requires the fiscal infrastructure to collect debts, through lending agencies or the tax system. A big question then is whether a country has these capacities for implementing and administering a student loan or higher education financing scheme. Countries need strong political support which is long term, enough bureaucratic capacity to ensure an effective administration and widespread public acknowledgement of the need for a higher education system and private contribution to its financing.

In this month’s EABER Newsletter Peter Drysdale and I argue that country specificity is important in the design, implementation and ultimately, the effectiveness, of higher education financing schemes. If Thailand were to implement a scheme similar to that in Australia or New Zealand, for example, it would be unlikely to generate either the same outcomes or the same level of debt repayment unless there were a raft of complementary reforms in the fiscal or social security system. One of the reasons for this might be that local incomes are not high enough in Thailand to allow for sufficient rates of repayment. But another critical reason has to do with the capacity to collect.