Student loans in financing higher education in India

Confronted with declining public budgets for education on the one hand, and the need for more resources on the other, many developing countries such as India, have been examining alternative methods of financing higher education. One such mechanism is student loans. A student loan programme is not a new phenomenon in India. The National Loans Scholarship Scheme has been in operation since 1963. This article critically reviews the experience of implementation of the National Loan Scholarship scheme. It examines strengths and weaknesses and problems specific to this programme in India, with a view to identifying measures for marginal improvement in the programme. The conclusion is that at present student loans make little contribution to either the efficiency or equity of higher education in India.     

Student loans for higher education in Singapore: some observations

The higher education system of Singapore is seen as crucial for the economic prosperity of the country. It is highly elitist, with fierce competition for limited places, and high private returns. In 1989 the Government announced a policy of reducing subsidies for higher education, in order to reduce the financial burden on the tax-payer, increase expenditure on other levels of education and achieve a more equitable distribution of costs. Tuition fees were increased sharply and a new student loan scheme, the Tuition Loan Scheme (TLS), was introduced. There are in addition two other loan schemes in Singapore, the Student Loan Fund (SLF), and the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Approved Education Scheme, under which parents may borrow from their CPF savings in order to finance their children's higher education, but must repay the loan. This article examines the arguments for and against student loans in Singapore, and concludes that the conditions necessary for a successful loan scheme are already in place: full employment, high private returns to higher education, and an efficient banking system and financial infrastructure. In the light of those conditions student loans seem to be an efficient and equitable form of finance for higher education in Singapore.Views do not implicate The National University of Singapore or The International Institute for Population Sciences. I am thankful to Mr Geoffrey Lau, Planning Services Unit, National University of Singapore for some suggestions and assistance. The usual disclaimers are relevant.     

Repayment burdens of student loans for Vietnamese higher education

Expansion of high education in Vietnam will be undermined without an effective student, loans policy to assist with tuition and living costs. We show the significance of this issue is by, constructing a hypothetical loans system and calculating repayment burdens (RBs) (the proportion of, a graduate's income required to repay the debt) for male and female in four different parts of Vietnam, and with respect to two levels of loans. Importantly, the exercises examine RBs across the whole, distribution of income using unconditional quantile techniques. We find that RBs involving loans for, tuition only are likely to lead to significant RBs for poor graduates, with much higher loans being, associated with critical financial difficulties for perhaps the majority of debtors. This will result in high, default rates and consumption difficulties for borrowers, implying strongly that a student loan system, with such high RBs is unlikely to be successful in Vietnam.     

Student loans in Ghana

Student loans were first introduced in Ghana in 1971, but the scheme was abandoned the following year, due to a change of government. A revised scheme was introduced in 1975, but faced problems of high rates of default. Attempts to improve recovery since 1986 have had some success, but in 1989 the Government of Ghana introduced a new student loan scheme, which is administered by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust. This article summarises the current pattern of finance of higher education, gives a brief history of student loans in Ghana and describes the new scheme, introduced in 1989.     

Student loans in Nigeria

The Nigerian Students Loans Board was first established in 1972, and between 1973 and 1991 it provided loans totalling 46 million Naira, to help Nigerian students finance undergraduate or postgraduate study in Nigeria or abroad. There have been severe problems, however, and the rate of recovery of loan repayments has been very disappointing. This article describes the operation of the student loan programme in Nigeria and its past problems, outlines the current attempts of the Nigerian Students Loans Board to improve the efficiency of loan collection and proposes the establishment of a new Education Bank to finance student loans and other forms of investment in higher education.     

Student assessment of teaching in higher education

Plans to introduce campus-wide assessments of college or university teaching which are largely dependent on student ratings are seen as a threat to academic freedom in those institutions with little or no experience of this form of evaluation. While regular student evaluations of teaching are very common in North America, their introduction is only now being considered in colleges and universities in a number of other countries. Research on the reliability and validity of student ratings indicate that they are capable of providing valuable information about the quality of teaching. Depending on the survey used, this type of evaluation may be used to provide evidence of teaching ability to staffing committees or to suggest ways of improving teaching. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for higher education institutions which are considering the regular assessment of all teachers by their students.     

The demand for student loans in higher education: A study of preferences and attitudes

This empirical study examined postsecondary-student attitudes and preferences regarding five discrete student loan plans and loan plan features. Certain demographic variables were examined for their relationship to student attitudes toward the various loan plans. The study addressed the following questions: What debt ceiling do students identify as acceptable? Are students willing to indebt themselves over an extended time span? What percent of annual income do they feel reasonably can be applied to loan repayment? Will students alter their repayment plan choices given additional and more detailed information about loan options? A random sample of 218 recipients of federal higher education loans during the 1973–74 academic year was drawn from the population of 6,765 undergraduate borrowers at the University Park Campus of the Pennsylvania State University.     

香港地区学生贷款:贷款机构的视角

根据政府对资本市场干预程度的不同 ,香港地区形成了三类教育贷款 ,即政府补贴性贷款、成本回收型教育贷款和盈利性教育贷款。这三类教育贷款在满足不同群体的教育需求上是互补的。香港入息教育款的成本回收率达 71 .4% ,这表明香港的教育贷款已形成了一个良好的资金发放与回收体系 ,1 %的贷款拖欠率亦表明香港已具备了完备的个人信用制度与金融网络体系     

The Perpetual Education Fund: Providing higher education loans in the voluntary sector

Although many strategies are proposed to reduce the opportunity gap in higher education between and within countries, student loans with cost recovery measures are often preferred during times of fiscal constraint. This study briefly reviews the benefits and challenges of student loans over other forms of financial aid and presents the case for voluntary sector involvement in contexts where government and market failures constrain effective solutions. It describes an innovative program that has emerged to meet this challenge—the Perpetual Education Fund. This program utilizes public–private partnerships, a large financial corpus, pre-existing administrative structures, personal relationships, local vocational schooling, and intergroup solidarity to administer loans and recover costs. Because voluntary sector participation in loan financing and administration is relatively new, the experiences and innovative survival strategies of this program have valuable implications for other emerging programs.     

Student satisfaction in higher education: a meta-analytic study

This paper discusses the results of a meta-analysis performed to identify key antecedent and consequent constructs of satisfaction in higher education. We offer an integrated model to achieve a better understanding of satisfaction in the context of higher education. To accomplish this objective, we identified 83 studies that were valid and relevant to the research objective of the current study, generating a total of 469 observations. We identified studies published from 1986 to 2016 and analyzed six antecedent dimensions (perceived value of educational services, resources provided to the student, service quality perception, marketing orientation, identity of the higher education institution, university environment) and one consequent dimension related to satisfaction. The 7 dimensions exhibited a total of 51 relationships. We believe that the originality of the findings clearly contributes to future academic research in higher education.     

Student voice in higher education: Opening the loop

UK national policy and the practices of university course boards tend to reduce understandings of ‘student voice’ to a feedback loop. In this loop, students express feedback, the university takes this on board, then they tell the students how they have responded to their feedback. The feedback loop is a significant element of the neoliberal imaginary of higher education globally. This qualitative research study drew on interviews with course representatives in three universities in England, and on policy analysis, to explore the discursive construction and enactment of student voice. It uses the feedback loop as an analytical frame. Drawing on Foucault’s later work, the article aims to open up the feedback loop by exploring its manifestation in the mundane everyday practices of universities. In opening the loop, we identify the following effects of the student voice policy ensemble: students have to construct feedback as it is not just waiting to be gathered; it promotes a dividing practice, where reps are positioned differently to other students; there is a focus on problems; an ‘us and them’ is reinforced between staff and students; the loop closes down discussion; and a managerial logic obscures political processes. The article articulates its opening of the loop as a way of unmasking the modes of power which work through discourses of ‘student voice’, and hence seeks to create possibilities for resistance to being governed this way.     

Student mentoring in higher education: Hong Kong Baptist University

There is a developing interest in mentoring in the educational system in Hong Kong, especially in higher education. Mentoring is looked at as a retention and enhancement strategy for undergraduate education. With the setting up of a mentoring system during the freshmen year, it is hoped that student retention can be increased and academic achievement can be promoted. The study aims to find out the current mentoring practices carried out at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Results are based upon quantitative data collected from 456 students and 79 faculty members engaging in the mentoring programme of the University Life Programme at the university in 1998. The author also conducted insight interviews into the student–mentor relationship and the problems encountered by mentors. The study focuses upon students' perspectives of an ‘effective’ mentor. The implications for resources are discussed as part of a review of the mentoring programme at the university.     

Student loans repayment and recovery: international comparisons

Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two issues in this paper, for 44 loans schemes in 39 countries: how much of the original loan is an individual student required to repay (the “repayment ratio”) and what percentage of the total costs of loans schemes can the lending body expect to receive back in repayments (the “recovery ratio”)? The analysis shows considerable variation in the size of the repayment and recovery ratios across schemes. Moreover, many loans schemes exhibit sizeable built-in subsidies accruing to student borrowers—in over 40% of the schemes examined, the repayment ratio is 40% or less. Overall loans recovery is considerably lower. Policy implications of these findings are discussed together with a consideration of steps that may be taken to improve the financial outcome of loans schemes.     

Student employment: social differentials and field-specific developments in higher education

In this article, we examine social origin differences in employment patterns across different stages of higher education and compare these differences between vocational and academic fields of study. Using data from a large-scale German student survey, we study the development of inequality, according to social origins, in student employment from first-year to graduating students. We show that inequality in job quality exists and is partly attributable to the need for students from lower social origins to work in order to finance their studies. We hypothesise that initial inequalities decrease as students progress through higher education. While we find evidence for this hypothesis, we also show in multivariate models that the reduction of inequality in the student labour market is explained by prior differences between social origin groups.     

Student plagiarism in higher education in Vietnam: an empirical study

This paper assesses and compares the prevalence of plagiarism across different student and assignment characteristics at a university in Vietnam, using the similarity index reported by the text-matching software Turnitin as a proxy measure of plagiarism on a sample of 681 student papers. The findings present a level of match higher than reported in earlier studies at universities outside of Vietnam, with an average similarity index of 29.06%. Controlling for the gender and major of the students, the extent of plagiarism is implied to be negatively correlated with the students’ academic performances and with the likelihood of being caught, and positively correlated with the length of the assignments. Thus, this study, relying on actual text-matching data rather than self-reported surveys, provides the first empirical test of two theoretical plagiarism models proposed in the literature. The explanatory factors confirmed by this study illustrate the potential benefits of the use of software tools to detect plagiarism and can help refine academic integrity policy formulations for universities.     

Student characteristics and academic performance in higher education: A review

This is a review of the recent literature on student characteristics and their predictive potential for academic achievement. Results are not optimistic, often contradictory, and on the whole account for little variance beyond that accounted for by tests of intellectual ability. Researchers often use different performance criteria and so results are not comparable. However, there has been much complex, diverse, and unique work done on personality and motivational factors but no clear trends have emerged. Other factors investigated have been home and class background, study habits, previous withdrawal, and expectations. The review concludes by demonstrating the usefulness of the cluster analysis approach which indicates groups of students with similar patterns of characteristic criteria.