Die USA forderten etwa von mehreren WTO Mitgliedsstaaten, Fortbildungsdienstleistungen und Erwachsenenbildungsstätten im Ausland zu ermöglichen. Bisher wurden etwa für Anbieter dieser Dienstleistungen in vielen Ländern spezielle Steuern eingehoben, Verbote für Anbieter von Hochschuldienstleistungen oder besondere Aufnahmebedingungen für ausländische AkademikerInnen eingeführt. Diese "Störungen" sollen nun behoben werden.
Profitieren würden dabei vor allem Konzerne, die Hochschul- und Erwachsenenbildungsprogramme anbieten, da sie mehr Ambitionen haben, im Ausland zu agieren, als Lehrende, die offiziell die Nutznießer des Falls der Barrieren genannt werden.
Der Text des Chronicle:
Colleges, Fighting U.S. Trade Proposal, Say It Favors
For-Profit Distance Education
By ANDREA FOSTER
A little-known proposal by U.S. officials to remove
international trade barriers to higher education has
infuriated many college leaders,who say federal policy is
being unfairly set by for-profit-education providers,
including distance-education institutions. The college
officials say the proposal could end up undermining many
institutions' independence.
At the center of the dispute is a U.S. document submitted a
year ago to the World Trade Organization under the terms of
the General Agreement on Trade in Services. It asks WTO member
countries to begin formal negotiations to reduce barriers that
keep colleges, adult-education centers, and training services
from offering courses to students in other countries.
In general, the document (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader,
available free) calls for the removal of a series of
"obstacles" to colleges operating in other countries. These
obstacles include special taxes, outright bans on
higher-education services from foreign institutions,
restrictions on online instructional material from abroad,
long delays in government approval of foreign programs, and
difficult requirements for foreign academics entering and
leaving countries. While removing such obstacles would, in
theory, enable all kinds of American colleges to operate more
easily abroad, the document emphasizes job-related programs
and testing services, areas in which for-profit providers have
more ambition abroad than do most traditional colleges. In
addition, the proposal says the United States "is willing to
consider" easing trade restrictions for higher education and
training, as 21 countries already did in the Uruguay Round of
international agreements, which took effect in January 1995.
The United States is purposefully coy about its commitment to
freer trade in higher education because, officials say,
revealing too much too soon to its trading partners could
jeopardize its negotiating clout.
Australia and New Zealand submitted higher-education proposals
similar to those in the U.S. document. In effect, these
broadly worded proposals start the clock ticking on
negotiations over higher-education concerns, which are among
many trade issues waiting to be discussed. Trade experts say
higher education would have come to the fore sooner or later
in any case.
The General Agreement on Trade in Services was established in
January 1995 as a legal framework for countries engaged in
trade negotiations in a broad range of service sectors,
including higher education. Under the GATS negotiation
schedule for services, the next step will be for countries to
make specific requests of their trading partners by June 30 to
open their markets. By March 31, 2003, countries will present
offers to open their markets. The goal is to conclude the
negotiations in three years, and have a single treaty that
would be ratified by government bodies, such as the Senate in
the case of the United States.
So far, no country has made a specific request of another
country concerning higher education.
Complex Regulations
Several distance education providers say the U.S. proposal is
necessary to remove obstacles to international education. Some
foreign countries impose tariffs on incoming satellite feeds,
for instance, or create complex recognition regulations that
effectively shut out course providers based elsewhere.
But opponents say such problems can be handled through
existing channels, and that the government should not seek to
have GATS applied to American higher education. The most
outspoken critics of the U.S. trade proposal are the American
Council on Education and the Council for Higher Education
Accreditation. The groups, which largely represent nonprofit
institutions, say such a treaty could drive a wedge between
public and private institutions in the United States and
threaten developing countries' efforts to create their own
educational systems.
The groups also say the proposal is perceived by some
countries as an effort to "Americanize" higher education
worldwide. And the groups argue that the trade agreement could
expose American colleges op-
erating abroad to punitive tariffs by other countries if the
United States became mired in a trade dispute unrelated to
education. In the widely reported banana-trade war between the
United States and Europe, for example, the WTO favored the
United States, which then imposed tariffs on a variety of
European goods, including cheese and handbags.
"One of the reasons American higher education is among the
best in the world is because of the autonomy of institutions,"
says Fred M. Hayward, executive vice president of the Council
for Higher Education Accreditation. But in a trade agreement,
he adds, "there is always a pressure to centralize decision
making and authority." The council represents about 3,000
accredited colleges and 60 recognized accrediting agencies in
the United States.
And Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government
relations at ACE, says this country's decentralized
higher-education system means that the federal government
cannot make commitments to foreign governments about American
colleges, even public ones. "Because public education is under
state governments, we don't think the [U.S.] Department of
Education can tell states, This is how you should do it."
Opponents of the trade proposal fault the Office of the U.S.
Trade Representative, the federal agency charged with
negotiating global trade agreements, for offering it. They say
the trade office has been too heavily influenced by the
National Committee for International Trade in Education, a
nonprofit organization based in Washington.
Some of their criticism is directed at Marjorie Peace Lenn,
that committee's executive director and a member of a group
that advises the U.S. trade representative's office on trade
agreements. Ms. Lenn organizes conferences for educators about
globalization in higher education and promotes international
standards for professions and for assessing the quality of
education.
The International Trade Administration, a division of the U.S.
Commerce Department, early last year cited the National
Committee for International Trade in Education as the U.S.
government's "advocate on matters of international trade
policy" concerning education and training. Pressed for details
about barriers to trade in education, U.S. trade officials
often refer a questioner to Ms. Lenn. And Ms. Lenn embraces
the status; a Web page for her trade-in-education committee
says the group is "the organized voice" for American
education, training, and testing in regional and global trade
agreements.
"I'm not quite sure who anointed her the spokesman for higher
education in this area," says Sheldon E. Steinbach, vice
president and general counsel of the American Council on
Education. Even though Ms. Lenn's group does not represent a
broad spectrum of colleges, he says, no other group in higher
education was dealing with the issue, so "she stepped into a
vacuum."
The group's list of sponsoring institutions includes Temple
and George Washington Universities, established nonprofit
institutions that are aggressively exploring overseas
ventures, some of which are commercial. And it also includes
many professional organizations, such as the Accreditation
Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine; some
nonprofit distance-learning institutions, such as University
of Maryland University College; and accrediting groups for
traditional colleges, like the Accrediting Council for
Independent Colleges and Schools, which are recognized by the
Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
Roadblocks Abroad
The push for the trade proposal is due in large part to
technological advances such as e-mail, instructional software,
and Internet video and audio transmissions that make it
possible for educational institutions to reach students far
beyond their physical headquarters. GW Solutions, a for-profit
arm of George Washington University that offers
business-related distance-education courses, has run into a
variety of technology-related roadblocks, says Ted
Christiansen, GW Solutions' assistant vice president for
business development.
Some countries hit CD-ROM's with import tariffs, as if they
were used only for entertainment, even though many of them
contain academic courses, says Mr. Christiansen, adding: "I
think we need to recognize that education is in a different
class than music or movies." And some telephone companies in
Caribbean countries, such as Jamaica, impose
Internet-connection fees that exceed a dollar a minute. That
makes it too costly for people there to take advantage of GW
Solutions' distance-learning programs, he says.
Other barriers are simply protectionist. Mexico restricts the
use of its satellites to domestic institutions, and Malaysia
limits the establishment of antennas altogether, says Ms.
Lenn.
But Eugenio Cetina, director general for higher education in
Mexico, says he has not heard of his country limiting the use
of satellites. Foreign and Mexican institutions collaborate
for distance education, he adds.
One of the biggest frustrations for United States-based
educational institutions is that many foreign countries do not
recognize them, or they subject them to convoluted accrediting
procedures. The result is that degrees foreign students
receive from U.S. institutions may be worthless at home.
But some countries, such as South Africa, say restrictive
policies toward foreign education providers discourage
money-making enterprises at a time when their nations are
working to create a public education system that can redress
social ills -- racial injustice in the case of South Africa.
Pamela Pease, president of Jones International University,
offers China as an example of a country that discourages
colleges and commercial education ventures from providing
services. The university does not have a program in China that
is recognized by the country's ministry of education. But
Jones does not turn away Chinese students who register online
for Jones's courses. "You may have to register with the
ministry of education and go through a protracted, ill-defined
system," she says. "Theoretically, it could be years to get
through their system."
Ms. Pease and other advocates of the trade proposal also say
international standards for assessing the quality of education
are needed to discourage fly-by-night institutions from
entering the market, provide a more-transparent accrediting
process, and give students confidence in the degrees they
earn.
The Wrong Approach?
But the American Council on Education and the Council for
Higher Education Accreditation say the trade barriers
identified by some educational interests are not major
problems for their members. And they see the imprint of
for-profit institutions on the U.S. trade proposal.
Mr. Hayward, of the accreditation group, says the proposal
tries to appease, for example, testing providers who complain
of having to pay a duty on test material, and educational
institutions that complain of obstacles to getting overseas
work permits for employees. He says the State Department or
Treasury Department typically helps resolve such problems.
The proposal "seems like using a cannon to kill a fly," he
says. Mr. Hayward says he found out about it a year ago, not
through the U.S. trade representative's office, but through
the Association of European Universities. In a speech he
delivered to a conference of his organization in June, he said
the proposal "went to the World Trade Organization without
being seen by the major representatives of the
higher-education community."
Mr. Hayward also worries that the proposal could favor private
over public institutions, or vice versa. That's because the
general principles of GATS say government services are
excluded from coverage, which implies that the agreement
covers private colleges but exempts public colleges. That
could be detrimental to private colleges if, for example, a
country decided to tax distance education, Mr. Hayward says.
"Would the&distance-education offering by the University of
California at Berkeley be exempt from GATS, but one offered by
Stanford be subject to a tax?" he asks.
By contrast, another section of GATS implies that U.S. public
colleges would be covered because it states that an exception
is made for excluding government services that face
significant competition from the private sector, Mr. Hayward
says. Since the United States has a lot of private colleges,
the WTO might assume they compete a lot with the public
colleges, he adds.
He says he worries that countries struggling to build a
national higher-education system could see large numbers of
middle-class and affluent students enrolling in private
foreign colleges -- including distance-learning institutions
-- leaving poorer students behind in a decaying public
higher-education system that does not receive enough financial
support from its government. South Africa, which is trying to
educate more black students, is particularly concerned about
this, says Mr. Hayward.
Madeleine F. Green, vice president and director of the Center
for Institutional and International Initiatives at the
American Council on Education, raises a bizarre scenario
should public colleges in the United States be covered by
GATS. In it, the trade agreement forces public colleges to
charge in-state-tuition rates to foreign students, while the
colleges continue to charge higher, out-of-state tuition to
students from the United States.
If the trade proposal does not clear up this and other areas
of confusion, she warns, disagreements among countries could
wind up being resolved through a WTO dispute panel, the norm
for enforcing trade agreements, rather than by educational
institutions.
ACE and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation
described their concerns in a joint letter to Joseph S.
Papovich, assistant U.S. trade representative for services,
investment, and intellectual property at the trade
representative's office.
ACE and the accrediting organization are now meeting regularly
with U.S. trade officials to discuss their grievances about
including the United States in a global trade agreement on
higher education.
'Waking Up Too Late?'
Bernard Ascher, director of service-industry affairs for the
U.S. trade office, says ACE and the Council for Higher
Education Accreditation don't understand the trade agreement.
He says they didn't take it seriously even though federal
trade officials warned them -- long before the U.S. proposal
was submitted to the WTO -- that higher education could become
part of GATS.
Mr. Hartle responds: "I'm ACE's chief government-relations
person, and I was never briefed about it."
Ms. Lenn, of the National Committee for International Trade in
Education, says ACE and the Council for Higher Education
Accreditation rejected her invitation to join discussions
about globalization in education. "It's sad that the
higher-education community would talk about who is allowed to
be anointed when they never had participated in the
discussion, but were invited from the beginning," she says.
She adds that community colleges, the Association of American
Universities, and the National Association of State
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges accepted her invitations.
But NASULGC has endorsed a document that is highly critical of
making higher education part of GATS. The AAU and the American
Association of Community Colleges have not take a position on
the trade proposal. However, an official with the
community-college group says it shares the concerns of ACE and
the accrediting group.
Mr. Ascher, of the trade representative's office, says he is
annoyed by attempts to tar the trade proposal's for-profit
supporters as second-class educational providers. He
represents the United States in its trade negotiations over
higher education.
"There's a perception that if it's for-profit it's inferior,
because you're thinking only of the shareholders," he says.
Groups representing nonprofit colleges "can't really prove
anything like that."
"Are you going to tell Columbia and Duke and Harvard that
they're cutting corners in their profit-making side?" Mr.
Ascher asks. "It's almost as if there is a fear among these
colleges that the nonprofit side is going to lose out."
He says a pact on higher education is needed because
foreigners spent $10.29-billion a year to be educated in the
United States during 2000 -- the latest year for which figures
are available -- making education the country's sixth-largest
export. And the figure would be higher if the United States
included the value of educational services reaching students
abroad through distance learning and overseas branch campuses,
an expenditure the government doesn't measure.
Among the most popular courses that American institutions
offer abroad are those on computers and information
technology, management training, and language instruction,
says Mr. Ascher.
"There is a relatively new segment of education and training
that you don't hear much about," he said in a May 2001
statement prepared to explain the trade-agreement proposal to
American college officials. "It is market-oriented, and it is
growing."
Michael B. Goldstein, a lawyer who represents
distance-education institutions, attributes the negative
reaction to the trade proposal to financial self-interest.
Established nonprofit institutions are faring well with their
international programs under the current laissez-faire system,
and a trade agreement on higher education threatens to undo
that, he says.
"Right now it's an anarchic marketplace," he said. "If you
have a trade agreement, it brings order to the market. Their
position is, If it ain't broke, why fix it?"
Even some for-profit distance-education institutions say they
encounter few international complications and that, when they
do, they are able to resolve them on their own. But, Mr.
Goldstein says, it's only a matter of time before colleges in
the United States start seeing more protectionist trade
policies abroad. Distance learning is in its infancy, with the
student population still small enough that it has escaped the
notice of many foreign education officials, he says.
But is the United States prepared to lower its own barriers
and open its higher-education system to foreign competition?
Some education experts have their doubts.
Joseph Duffey, senior vice president of Sylvan Learning
Systems, which is actively establishing educational programs
abroad, says the United States should not ask other countries
to liberalize their policies for granting visas to American
educators when the United States has restrictive visa
policies. And he doubts that states are prepared to forsake
their own standards for licensing and accrediting colleges in
order to adhere to a common international standard that would
allow colleges worldwide to set up branches in the United
States.
Though Sylvan was a founding member of the National Committee
on International Trade in Education, and Mr. Duffey once
served on the group's steering committee, Sylvan is no longer
a member of the group and has not taken a position on the
trade proposal.
"I have a sense of how this country is perceived when we sit
at the table passionately arguing for something -- when we
show no evidence that we're prepared to do it in our own
country," says Mr. Duffey. "It would be far more productive,
perhaps, to put our own house in order before we sit at the
international table and make these arguments."
SAMPLE BARRIERS TO TRADE IN EDUCATION
* Restrictions on the use of national satellites and receiving
dishes.
* Rules that prohibit foreign entities from offering
higher-education services in a country.
* Taxes that discriminate against foreign educational
institutions.
* Regulations that require a minimum percentage of instructors
to be local.
* Laws and regulations that are unclear and are administered
in an unfair manner.
* Regulations that require a local partner to participate in
any educational venture.
SOURCE: Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and National
Committee for International Trade in Education
TRADE TIMELINE
January 2000:
The United States and 142 other countries began negotiations
to reduce tariffs and trade barriers that affect a variety of
services, including higher education.
December 2000:
The United States submitted a broad proposal to reduce
barriers to trade in higher education.
June 30, 2002:
Countries will file requests asking trading partners to open
their markets in service areas.
March 31, 2003:
Countries that were the subjects of requests will present
offers to open their markets in service areas. Trading
partners will hold meetings and discussions. If they fail to
reach agreements regarding higher education, the issue could
be part of new round of global negotiations after talks
conclude in January 2005.
January 2005:
GATS negotiations will end.
SOURCE: Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
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