A Study of the Effect of Direct Test Preparation on the TOEIC Scores of Japanese University Students

A Study of the Effect of Direct Test Preparation on the TOEIC Scores of Japanese University Students

Source: http://tesl-ej.org/ej12/a2.html

Thomas N. Robb
Kyoto Sangyo University


Jay Ercanbrack
Kyoto Sangyo University


Abstract
In order to study the effect of direct test preparation on TOEIC gain scores, two samples of students (i.e., English majors and non-majors) at a Japanese university were divided into three treatment groups: 1) TOEIC Preparation, 2) Business English and 3) General (four-skills) English. The results indicate that usage of TOEIC preparatory materials led to a statistically significant gain on post-test scores for the non-majors' reading component only. The authors conclude that TOEIC preparatory materials are of little benefit to students enrolled in a comprehensive program of English language study, but might boost the score of the reading component of students enrolled in a university-level general English course in Japan.

Introduction

There is a clear tendency for students, not only in Japan, but around the world, to study for a test by reviewing past tests and concentrating their efforts on the types of language and test items that are known to appear on such tests. It is equally clear that if a test can be prepared for, then the test no longer can be said to measure general proficiency. Rather, it measures how well people have studied for the test.

Thus there is the inherent danger of the test becoming the tail that wags the curriculum dog. Henning expressed this concern thus: "If there is no concerted effort to subordinate testing to explicit curricular goals, there is an ever-present potential danger that tests themselves with all their inherent limitations will become the purpose of the educational encounter by default" (1990:380).

This study was designed to determine whether "teaching for the test" in a Japanese university setting does, in fact, result in higher test scores. Specifically, we set out to determine if students who use material designed for TOEIC test preparation or for "Business [-1-] English" achieve higher gain scores than students who study an equal amount of time with standard language study materials.

Past Studies
The authors have found little previous research related to gain scores on the TOEIC test and only two studies, Alderson & Wall (1993) and Alderson & Hamp-lyons (1996) concerning the TOEFL examination. These, however, were more concerned with the 'washback effect' on such test preparation on the actual content of classes and contained no objective data concerning the effects of coaching on subsequent test scores.

Fortunately, several studies have been conducted in relation to yet another standardized test, Educational Testing Service's SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), an exam which is administered to native-speaking high school students and is required as part of the application process for most American universities. Powers' (1993) "Coaching for the SAT: A Summary of the Summaries and an Update" is a thorough survey of such studies, particularly those which employ meta-analytical techniques to synthesize previous research. Much of what follows below has been drawn from this survey.

Preparation Programs for the SAT
Preparation programs for academic aptitude and language proficiency tests are currently abundant. Taken together, they constitute a vast industry within the private educational sector. Students are propelled toward such programs by a desire to succeed on tests where the perceived stakes are high. As noted by several researchers (e.g., Mehrens and Kaminsky 1989), the higher the stakes of a test, the greater the desire for guided test preparation and practice.

Yet, despite the great popularity of test preparation courses and programs, relatively little research has been done to document whether special preparation can have a markedly positive effect on test scores. A resolution of this issue is obviously crucial for the creators of standardized tests, as well as for the test-takers themselves. As mentioned, if preparation via coaching in test-taking techniques and strategies is found to be effective, it would indicate that test scores are not reliable indicators of academic ability or language proficiency, but rather reflect, at least to some degree, an ability to take tests. If such a situation exists, the validity of the tests is called into question.

Commercial coaching companies often report considerable gains in test scores by their clientele as proof of the effectiveness of their coaching programs. However, as Powers (1993) points out, variations in an individual's test scores from one test administration to another can be expected to occur, and for a variety of reasons. First, test score gains may be the result of [-2-] a "practice effect", wherein test takers have a greater sense of comfort, familiarity, and confidence when retaking a test (referred to by Bachman,1990, as "test-wiseness") than they possessed in their initial experience with the same exam. Such changes may also reflect growth in an individuals ability over time, rather than the direct influence of test coaching programs. Furthermore, variations in scores - either increases or decreases - may be due simply to measurement error. Upon retesting, it is quite usual for some examinees to show large increases in scores, and for others to show large decreases. This phenomenon of regression to the mean was demonstrated in a study by Johnson et al. (1985) . Examining an SAT coaching program, it was noted that the gains or losses recorded by coached students varied greatly depending on their initial test scores. Students who scored lowest on their first encounter with the SAT tended to make the greatest gains upon retesting, while those who at first scored most highly were likely to make the smallest gains or largest drops in their second round scores.

In contrast to the relative dearth of similar research concerning other large-scale, commercially available tests, several other studies have been conducted in the past two decades dealing with the effect of coaching on SAT scores (e.g., Becker 1990; Der Simonian and Laird 1983; Kulik, Bangert-Drowns and Kulik 1984; and Messick and Jungeblut 1981). As summarized by Powers (1993), and taking into account that simply repeating the test may lead to gains of around 15 points on the verbal section and 12 points on math (College Board 1991), these studies reveal that even the most well- known commercial coaching programs (e.g., Stanley Kaplan, Inc., and the Princeton Review) produce only modest score gains, typically 15 to 25 points each on the 200-800 point verbal and mathematical sections of the test. It has also been found that the scores of students who have undergone coaching receive a slightly higher boost on the math section than on the verbal section of the test (Becker 1990, Messick and Jungeblut 1981). In any case when, as suggested by Messick (1982), improvements in percentile ranking for coached students (usually consisting of only a few points) are considered, the gains made by coached SAT-takers appear to be meager. It seems clear then, at least in the case of the SAT, that the effects of coaching may fall far short of students expectations.

Beyond the direct influence of coaching, differences in scores between coached and uncoached students may reflect other factors and tendencies associated with each group. Powers (1981) offers evidence to show that students who utilize formal or commercialized coaching services also make greater use of other test preparation resources than their uncoached peers. For example, they are more likely to conduct their own review of relevant subject matter, read supplementary test preparation books, and attend review sessions provided by their own schools. Such tendencies make it difficult, if not impossible, to objectively assess the impact that coaching programs alone may have on those who enroll in them. [-3-]

One related question worth considering with regards to the test coaching issue is this: if coaching does have an effect (and it appears, as we have seen, to have at least some small impact on SAT scores), then what precisely is the reason for this effect? That is, what aspect of coaching is helping to raise test scores? One of the few studies to address this issue, again in the context of the SAT, was that of Johnson et al. (1985). It found that as a result of coaching, many test-takers were able to complete more items on both sections of the SAT. Since providing a correct answer on even a portion of the previously unmarked items would lead to higher overall scores, this newly developed ability was seen by the researchers as being the instrumental element in test score improvement for this set of coached students.

Though, as mentioned, few studies have analyzed the effect of coaching on language proficiency tests, one significant review (Kulik, Bangert-Drowns, and Kulik 1984) compares the SAT with a variety of other standardized aptitude tests, both academic and psychometric (e.g., GRE-Q, Stanford-Binet, WISC, etc.). It found that the affect of coaching for the other tests was much greater (approximately three times) than for the SAT. This may possibly be attributed to the preponderance of relatively simple test item formats found on the SAT. Item format is considered pivotal with regards to coaching since complex formats have been found to be more coachable than those of a simple nature (Powers 1986).

"Washback" Effects on Language Preparation Programs
While the literature on the effectiveness of preparation courses and programs for language proficiency tests is bleakly sparse, there are several studies which have concerned themselves with the washback effects of such tests on EFL/ESL classrooms (Wesdorp 1982; Hughes 1988; Khaniya 1990; Wall and Alderson 1993; and Alderson and Hamp-Lyons 1996, among others). Washback, a term popular in British applied linguistics and commonly referred to as backwash in the field of general education, may be understood as the influence that a test has on teaching and learning. The "Washback Hypothesis", as explained by Alderson and Wall, assumes that "teachers and learners do things they would not necessarily otherwise do because of the test" (1993:117).

The concept of washback presupposes a belief in the notion that tests are prominent determiners of classroom practices and events. Accordingly, the term itself is neutral in that the influence of a test may be either positive or negative in nature. That is, a poor test yields negative washback while a good test will have effects perceived as positive. As summarized by Alderson and Wall (1993), some of the negative effects tests have been suspected of producing include narrowing or distortion of the curriculum (Vernon 1956; Madaus 1988; Cooley 1991), loss of instructional time (Smith et al. 1989), reduced emphasis on skills that require complex [-4-] thinking or problem-solving (Frederickson 1984; Darling-Hammond and Wise 1985) and test score pollution, meaning gains in test scores without a paralleled improvement in actual ability in the construct under examination (Haladnya,Nolan, and Haas 1991).

In contrast, some researchers (i.e., Swain 1985 and Alderson 1986) emphasize the potential positive aspects of test influence and urge the creation of tests which, through constructive washback, will have enlightening effects on language curricula. Certain researchers (i.e., Morrow 1986 and Frederickson and Collins 1989) have suggested that a tests validity should be determined by the degree to which it has a positive influence on teaching. Morrow (1986) refers to this as washback validity, while Frederickson and Collins (1989) have introduced the term systemic validity to refer to a similar process.

Remarkably, while claims of washback and its effects, both positive and negative, are numerous in educational literature, Alderson and Wall (1993) point out that little empirical evidence has been provided to support the argument that tests do indeed influence teaching; that is, that washback actually exists. Assertions concerning washback in past studies have been based primarily on anecdotal evidence, primarily opinions and impressions gathered from teachers and administrators.

To amend this lack of objective data, Alderson and Hamp-Lyons (1996) set out to investigate the existence and extent of washback in one educational setting. Using a combination of classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students, they targeted preparation classes for the English proficiency test TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), an examination of particular importance to non-native speakers of English interested in entering degree programs at American universities. Two teachers received extensive observation in both their TOEFL preparation and regular English classes, and an attempt was made to separate the effects of individual teacher style from TOEFL washback.

The study did not investigate the question of whether or not TOEFL preparation courses were effective in raising scores on the test and, to this date, no previous research of this kind appears to have been conducted. Only the processes of teaching and learning were observed and examined in order to determine the extent of TOEFL washback in this setting. The authors concluded that the TOEFL did indeed affect both what and how teachers taught, but that the effect differed in degree and kind from teacher to teacher. More importantly, they suggested that it is not a test alone that causes washback, but the way that test is approached by administrators (who may determine the necessity of large class sizes), materials writers (who may fail to give proper guidance to teachers on possible ways to teach with a certain set of materials), and teachers themselves (who may devote little energy to finding alternative or innovative [-5-] ways to teach test preparation classes) which actually creates the phenomenon of washback for a given language proficiency test.

It is, then, against this broad backdrop of hypothesis and information concerning washback, generally, and the effects of coaching on test scores, specifically, that the present study was conducted.

Experimental Design
The study was carried out with two distinct samples of freshmen students at Kyoto Sangyo University: English majors (henceforth 'Majors') in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Non-Majors from other faculties of the university taking freshmen English courses offered by the school's English Language Education and Research Center. These two samples will be treated separately since there are important differences between them that make integration of the data unwise:

1. Contact hours/week. The majors were taking seven 90-minute classes per week in English. These students were pseudo-randomly assigned by the school to one of 8 sections ("kumi" in Japanese). Students in a particular section at Kyoto Sangyo University take classes together in all but two of of their seven 'practical' courses. It was not feasible to vary the content of all of the courses, so only two courses, "Extensive Reading" and "Listening/Pronunciation" were used in the experimental design. The other five courses taken by the majors included "Intensive Reading", "Grammar", "Composition", "Conversation" and "General Cultural Studies". An assumption was made that the content of the other courses would be roughly similar and would therefore not jeopardize the validity of the study. Two of the sections, 7 & 8, were English majors with a specialization in International Relations. These students had a slightly different program with a content course instead of grammar. The results with these classes both included and excluded were essentially the same, so this minor difference will henceforth be ignored.

Most, but not all, non-majors had two classes per week, one of which, "Applied English" was part of this study. The other class, "Reading" was a traditional reading class which concentrated on the careful reading and understanding of short passages of text. While it would have been better if this class, too, had been included in the study, this was unfeasible. Since all students were receiving a like amount of this reading practice however, this additional class should have made little difference in the overall outcome. The Applied English class met for a maximum of 27 class sessions during the school year for a maximum of 40.5 hours of contact time.

2. Level of English. The initial level of the majors was considerably higher than that of the non-majors, as would be [-6-] expected. One implication of this was that the same materials could not be used for both sets of students in most cases.

3. Motivation. The majors, having chosen English as their primary area of study for the next 4 years, could be assumed to be more interested in English and more highly motivated than the non-majors.

4. Homework. The English majors were much more likely to do home assignments. This was not so much a matter of intrinsic motivation as a consequence of the fact that their English courses were required. If they had failed to meet the instructor's expectations, they would have had to repeat the course. This, in turn (depending on the number of other failures), might have set back their year of graduation. For the non-majors, the course was not required. If they failed, they could take courses in a variety of other subjects to garner sufficient credits for graduation

Hypothesis
The gain scores of all students, regardless of method of study, would be equal.
Initial Setup
Class Configurations
The researchers had no control over the composition of the classes. The majors in groups 1 through 6 (English--Language & Culture) were assigned pseudo-randomly by the University administration. Groups 7 and 8 (English--International Relations) were assigned alphabetically.

For the non-majors, the students are grouped according to their desired second foreign language. For example, all Business Majors who desired to study French were formed into one or more classes. Since there are normally too many students for a single class, the students are further divided into multiple classes according to their total score on the university's entrance examination. For this experiment, the instructors were assigned to six of the classes which contained the highest ranking students for certain combinations of major + second foreign language.

As can be seen from Table 1, the Non-major design has a neat 3 x 2 arrangement (treatments x instructors) while there are only two instances of "major" instructors teaching two sections for the entire period. In both of these cases, the instructor has classes of the same treatment. [-7-]


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Table 1 -- Treatment Groups
Majors (Treatment & Instructor) Non-majors (Treatment,Instructor & Major) Reading Listening (Listening & Reading Class Class in one Class) 1 TOEIC A TOEIC H 101 General X Business Majors 2 TOEIC B TOEIC H/I 133 TOEIC X Economics Majors 3 TOEIC C TOEIC I 141 Business X Law Majors 4 General D General J 218 General Y Business Majors 5 Business E Business K 292 TOEIC Y Engineering Majors 6 General F General L 228 Business Y Economics Majors 7 General F General M 8 Business G Business K

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Prior Information Provided to the Students
The students were informed both in the course catalog and in their first class that a basic purpose of the course (regardless of treatment) was to achieve a high score on the TOEIC examination. Students were told that 20% of their final mark for the course would be based on the improvement in their test scores between the initial TOEIC examination (in May) and the final examination in January.

Preparation for Pre-test
A shortened, demonstration version of the TOEIC (Form MT-93) was administered to all sections as a class activity one to two weeks prior to the actual pre-test. A list of 'hints' and test-taking strategies was also provided to all students in Japanese.

This preparation was considered important as a way to partially offset the "practice effect", mentioned previously, whereby students generally score higher on second and successive administrations of a test merely due to greater familiarity with the test itself.

In this study we were more interested in assessing the effect of the variation in the teaching of language content rather than differences arising from the acquisition of test-taking strategies. While it was inevitable that the students in the 'TOEIC' treatment [-8-] would have more exposure over the course of the year to such test- taking strategies, we felt that this could be offset to some degree by familiarizing all students with the examination beforehand.

Pre- and Post-tests
The pre-test was administered on May 11, 1996, approximately one month after the start of the school year. For administrative reasons, it was impossible to schedule the test any earlier. The instructors in the TOEIC treatment, in particular, were instructed to avoid any classwork which could be termed "TOEIC test preparation" until the test was over. The 'general' and 'business' treatments had no other exposure to TOEIC-type questions during the course of the experiment, save for the one sample test and the actual pre- and post-tests.

The post-test was administered on January 18, 1997, which was the day after the conclusion of the final term. The pre-test had revealed some slightly significant differences in certain test groups (at the 0.05 level). It was decided to compensate for these differences in the final analysis by using an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Possible intervening variables such as age, club activities, etc. were also taken into account. The results of the pre- and post-test are presented below in "Results and Analysis."

Conduct Of The Courses
English Majors
Two of the once-weekly classes of the English majors were used for the experiment, their extensive reading class (I-B) and their listening/pronunciation class (I-F). For the extensive reading course, students in all groups were required to read over 1000 pages a year and to write summaries of what they read in a notebook kept for that purpose. Thus the three treatments were only different in the materials used for the in-class component.

Texts for each course were selected according to the following factors:

The material needed to be relevant to the specific treatment ('General', 'TOEIC' or 'Business' English).
The material had to be targeted at the appropriate ability level for the students in that particular course. In general, less challenging material was required for the non-major groups.
There had to be a sufficient volume of material for the number of class hours and expected hours of homework assignments.
For the listening component, we required a text that was accompanied by tapes that the students could listen to at home. (A special license was arranged with each publisher to duplicate their tapes for a modest fee.) [-9-]
For most of the treatments, the cost of the required materials was greater than students would normally be willing to pay for a university course bearing only 2 credits. Students were thus required to pay a maximum of 2500yen per course, the rest of the expense being subsidized by grant funds from TOEIC.

General English Treatment (Control)
Reading: For classwork, the students used the SRA "Reading Laboratory 2c" exclusively. There was no 'up front' instruction from the teacher. This is the material normally used in this course for the in-class component of the I-B extensive reading course.

Listening: The students used the following texts.
Practice with English Reduced Forms, Sanshusha Eigo Onseigaku no Kiso (Basic English Phonetics), Kenkyusha
TOEIC Treatment
The main text, On Target for the TOEIC (Longman) was shared between the reading and listening sections, each of which did the sections relevant to their particular course. This text was chosen over other available texts because it contained the most 'pedagogical material' in addition to the ubiquitous practice items and vocabulary lists. Copies of the audio tape for this text were distributed to all students. There was also a Japanese language companion text with notes, translations of vocabulary, etc. In addition, the following texts were used in order to provide a sufficient volume of material for the year course:

Reading:
Improving Your Pronunciation (Meirindo+ tape) Building Skills for TOEIC (Pifer)
TOEIC Kisokara Gambare! - Vocabulary
Listening:
TOEIC Kisokara Gambare! - Listening (with tape)
Practice with English Reduced Forms

Business Treatment
Business Objectives (Oxford) was shared between the reading and listening sections, each doing the relevant parts. Copies of the audio tape for this text were distributed to all students. Other supplementary texts used were:

Reading:
English by Newspaper (Heinle & Heinle)
Listening:
Business Venture [-10-]
English by Newspaper,
While the above is not a business text, it was adopted after two considerations, 1) there were no 'business reading' texts available for students at the low-intermediate level, and 2) the material in "English by Newspaper" contained numerous articles in business and related fields. .

Non-majors
General English Treatment (Control)

Main Text:

High Impact (Longman) + Workbook & Tapes
High Impact is a four skills text written primarily for Japanese 'false beginners.' It was targeted at a lower level than the corresponding text used for the English majors, since it was assumed (correctly) that the non-majors general level of English proficiency would be considerably lower.

TOEIC Treatment
Main Text:

On Target for the TOEIC (Addison-Wesley)
Japanese companion text + Tapes
TOEIC kara Gambare! (Vocabulary)
Business Treatment Main Text:
Business Basics (Oxford) + Tapes
This text was selected for similar reasons to High Impact -- it was deemed to be targeted at the correct level for non-major students.

The content of each course was thus dictated by the assigned texts. No direct control was exerted over the instructors to conform to a specific lesson plan. The instructors, however, were encouraged to coordinate their class with the other instructors teaching the same materials, either through face-to-face meetings or by keeping a log into which each could report their progress. (The teachers for the TOEIC treatment reading classes, in particular, taught on different days and thus rarely had a chance to meet each other in person.)

Quizzes
Quizzes were prepared for each of the taped listening sections of each text and for the "TOEIC Kiso Kara Gambare" vocabulary text. The teachers were to use them to check how well the students had prepared the assigned homework. (Japanese students are apt to ignore homework when their is no specific way to assess whether they have done it or not.) These quiz scores were centrally recorded, although differences in frequency and manner of administration [-11-] rendered them unusable for purposes of this study. Nevertheless, they were important as a motivational tool and as an element of the final grade given to each student.

Questionnaire
A questionnaire was administered to all students at the end of the year to 1) gather statistical data on other activities which might have influenced their progress in English and 2) measure their attitudes towards different aspects of the course. In particular, data concerning additional English classes taken and prior overseas experience proved meaningful for proper interpretation of the data. The questionnaire with analyses are presented in Appendix B.


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Table 2 -- Net Gain in Scores by Treatment Non-Majors TOTGAIN LISTGAIN READGAIN Business N OF CASES 53 53 53 MEAN GAIN 6.415 -6.981 13.396 STANDARD DEV 71.403 49.907 40.641 General N OF CASES 46 46 46 MEAN GAIN 12.609 0.326 12.283 STANDARD DEV 77.386 48.217 51.020 TOEIC N OF CASES 50 50 50 MEAN GAIN 53.300 5.400 47.900 STANDARD DEV 80.930 44.845 51.844 Majors TOTGAIN LISTGAIN READGAIN Business N OF CASES 60 60 60 MEAN GAIN 60.917 31.333 29.583 STANDARD DEV 58.226 47.299 33.119 General N OF CASES 83 83 83 MEAN GAIN 52.349 28.795 23.554 STANDARD DEV 59.614 42.667 41.647 TOEIC N OF CASES 73 73 73 MEAN GAIN 80.000 40.479 39.863 STANDARD DEV 64.253 46.091 43.922

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[-12-]
Results & Analysis
Below are the resulting gain scores (Post-test scores minus Pre-test scores). The actual pre-test and post-test scores are presented in Appendix A

Analysis Of Variance (Non-majors)
Systat version 5.0 was used to perform an analysis of variance on the data. In order to save space only the most useful data are reported below. For each population (Majors and Non-majors) tests were performed on the scores on the January 18 administration (coded at '118'), using the baseline score as a covariate (May 11 administration, coded as '511'). Data from the questionnaire were used as potential intervening variables.

Results for Non-majors
Total Score
A slightly signifcant effect was found (p=0.039) for the treatment when only the pre-test was used as a covariate in the analysis, but once the students' response to the question concerning outside English study (OTHERCL) was taken into consideration, this significant difference disappeared (p=0.092).


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Table 3 -- Analysis of Total Scores (TOTAL118) for Non-majors DEP VAR:TOTAL118 N: 149 MULTIPLE R: 0.547 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.300 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 34003.100 2 17001.550 3.331 0.039 TOTAL511 309338.355 1 309338.355 60.601 0.000 ERROR 740151.649 145 5104.494 ---------------------------------------------------------------- [-13-] Analysis of TOTAL118 (Non-majors) with the intervening variable, 'OTHERCL' (Other English classes) added to the equation. DEP VAR:TOTAL118 N: 127 MULTIPLE R: 0.618 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.382 (22 cases deleted due to missing data -- No questionnaire) ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 23321.456 2 11660.728 2.429 0.092 TOTAL511 245203.451 1 245203.451 51.069 0.000 OTHERCL 74208.663 1 74208.663 15.456 0.000 ERROR 585769.217 122 4801.387

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Listening Sub-test Only
No signficant difference appeared between the groups (0.787).


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Table 4 -- Analysis of Listening Scores (LIST118) for Non-majors DEP VAR: LIST118 N: 149 MULTIPLE R: 0.392 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.153 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 986.725 2 493.362 0.240 0.787 LIST511 53887.223 1 53887.223 26.257 0.000 ERROR 297586.783 145 2052.323

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Reading Sub-test Only
A highly significant difference (p=0.002) appeared between the groups when only the pre-test was taken into consideration. Once the intervening variables 'CLUB' (Particpation in a club for studying English), 'OSEAS' (Overseas experience) and "OUTSIDE" (Language classes outside the university) were added to the equation, the significance of the difference decreased 10-fold in [-14-] magnitude, nevertheless remaining signifcant at the p=0.02 level. A post hoc Scheff was then performed to determine where the signifcant difference lay. As indicated in Table 4, the results of the TOEIC treatment group turned out to be significantly different from only the General treatment group.


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Table 5 -- Analysis of Reading Scores (READ118) for Non-majors DEP VAR: READ118 N: 149 MULTIPLE R: 0.586 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.343 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 21184.068 2 10592.034 6.435 0.002 READ511 116316.437 1 116316.437 70.661 0.000 ERROR 238685.870 145 1646.109 DEP VAR: READ118 N: 127 MULTIPLE R: 0.653 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.426 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 14030.878 2 7015.439 4.060 0.020 READ511 99584.655 1 99584.655 57.630 0.000 CLUB 805.702 1 805.702 0.466 0.496 OUTSIDE 753.678 1 753.678 0.436 0.510 OSEAS 7172.884 1 7172.884 4.151 0.044 ERROR 207360.867 120 1728.007 Post Hoc Test of READ118 USING MODEL MSE OF 1604.609 WITH 120. DF. MATRIX OF PAIRWISE MEAN DIFFERENCES: BUSIN GEN'L TOEIC BUSIN 0.000 GEN'L -4.198 0.000 TOEIC 21.141 25.339 0.000 [-15-] SCHEFFE TEST. MATRIX OF PAIRWISE COMPARISON PROBABILITIES: BUSIN GEN'L TOEIC BUSIN 1.000 GEN'L 0.898 1.000 TOEIC 0.079 0.032 1.000

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Results For Majors
Table 6 presents the analysis of variance for the Total, Listening, and Reading Scores for the Majors. None resulted in a signficant difference at the criterion level of 0.05. We can therefore state that for the majors, there was no signficant difference in the test scores depending on the treatment.


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Table 6 -- Analysis of Scores for Majors DEP VAR: TOTGAIN N: 216 MULTIPLE R: 0.421 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.177 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE TREAT$ 17884.770 2 8942.385 2.811 0.062 TOTAL511 519685.583 1 519685.583 163.389 0.000 ERROR 674302.491 212 3180.672 DEP VAR: LIST118 N: 216 MULTIPLE R: 0.539 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.291 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 2951.144 2 1475.572 0.879 0.417 LIST511 140482.164 1 140482.164 83.670 0.000 ERROR 355946.662 212 1678.994 [-16-] DEP VAR: READ118 N: 216 MULTIPLE R: 0.581 SQUARED MULTIPLE R: 0.338 ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE SOURCE SUM-OF-SQUARES DF MEAN-SQUARE F-RATIO P TREAT$ 5029.187 2 2514.593 2.071 0.129 READ511 130148.453 1 130148.453 107.167 0.000 ERROR 257463.134 212 1214.449

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Discussion
Our hypothesis was that the gain scores of all students, regardless of method of study, would be equal. This was confirmed in all but one instance: Non-Major students given the TOEIC treatment showed a significant gain on the Reading Section compared to those who studied using regular materials or business materials. The students of one instructor for the Non-Majors actually demonstrated a gain of 77 points overall, with 56 of them in the reading section (Table 7).


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Table 7 -- Mean Gains for Non-Major Sections, By Instructor TOTAL LISTENING READING Instructor X Business MEAN GAIN -11.4 -21.7 10.3 General MEAN GAIN -8.2 -8.2 0.0 TOEIC MEAN GAIN 24.7 -13.3 38.0 Instructor Y Business MEAN GAIN 27.9 10.8 17.1 General MEAN GAIN 27.2 4.6 30.9 TOEIC MEAN GAIN 77.6 21.3 56.3

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Although the gains for one of the instructors for Non-Majors are considerably greater than those of the other instructor for this [-17-] group, the pattern is similar in that the Reading Section always shows a greater gain than the listening section, and the TOEIC treatment shows a greater gain than the other two treatments which are similar in their total gain scores. No differences emerged on the follow-up questionnaire (Appendix B) which would account for this difference in the results.

It is also clear that whatever gains there might have been with the majors were 'washed out' by the many other courses which they were taking concurrently. Some might claim that it would have been wiser to alter the content of all classes during the week so that clearer results could have been obtained. This, however, would have resulted in an artificial curriculum, one which would not normally exist at a university. Since English majors would take TOEIC preparation as only one element of their course of study, our model closely approximates a possible implementation.

One surprising result is that the Non-Major students, with the exception of Instructor Y's TOEIC section, improved very little over the course of the year and in some cases, even showed 'negative gain'. This can be taken as a testament to the poor attitude of Japanese university students towards their 'general education' subjects. The instructors reported that they could assign little homework since there was little expectation that the students would actually do it. Thus most of the students' exposure was limited to the 26 class meetings. It appears that the activities carried out in class did not, for many students, result in any real 'learning' that could be translated into improved TOEIC scores.

Even with the one section that did show great improvement, we cannot ascertain how much of this gain can be attributed to greater 'test wiseness' as opposed to greater knowledge of English. It would appear, however, that a greater knowledge of the schema of the written genre appearing on the TOEIC examination might have been a significant factor. This and other possible causes are discussed in the following section.

Improvement in Reading vs Listening
Although all groups generally showed improvement over the course of the year, one salient difference between the Non-Majors and Majors lies in where the improvement took place. With the majors, the improvement in the Listening and Reading scores was almost equal, whereas with the Non-Majors, there was little gain in the listening component (-6.9, 0.3 and 5.4 for the three treatments) and a greater rate of improvement in the reading section (13.3, 12.2 and 47.9). There was little improvement in listening even though both of the instructors used English as the medium of instruction. We can tentatively postulate the following reasons for this: [-18-]

The students did not spend much time at home listening to the tapes. This is supported by their responses to the question "I listened to the tapes at home regularly" where the average of their self-reports was under 3.0, with '5' meaning 'agree' and '1' meaning 'disagree'. (Figure 1).


Figure 1

The 'teacher talk' may have been significantly different in its essential nature from the language used on the TOEIC and therefore of little help in improving their scores on the listening test items.
The main text for the 'TOEIC' group On Target for the TOEIC was used in the order that the material was presented in the book, where the listening material precedes the reading material. At the time of the post-test, then, the students had just completed the reading section, while the listening section had been finished months earlier.
The Listening section is administered before the Reading section in the actual TOEIC examination. Since the students at the beginning of the year were not familiar with the test, it could well be that they tired towards the end. This would have resulted in poorer performance and a measurement which under-estimated their actual ability in reading (=one result of the 'practice effect').
Concerning the TOEIC treatment which demonstrated the largest gain on the reading section, one of the instructors noted a positive reaction among the students to one particular section of the text which dealt with finding details in written texts such as letters and advertisements. It appears that this kind of material was completely new to them and, indeed, it is not part of the general high school English curriculum in Japan. Thus not only did they actually learn some important skills here, these are skills which were not covered to the same extent in the Business or General [-19-] treatments' texts, although both of them did also contain some letters as part of their instructional content.
One instructor reported that he had heavily stressed the fact that improvement in the TOEIC score would be an important factor in their final grade. Actually, this policy applied to students in all treatments, and they were informed of this in the course prospectus at the beginning of the year. It seems however, that this point may have received more emphasis in at least one of the TOEIC treatments.
Concerning the Majors, they achieved similar gains on both sections due to the more balanced curriulum, as explained in the presentation of the experimental design in the section entitled "Contact Hours/Week" above.
Conclusion
While this study seems to suggest that TOEIC materials can be effective for improving the reading component scores of non-major students at a Japanese university, our results are by no means conclusive. The non-major students, for example, had initial scores far below those of the English majors. It could be that students in this low score range can benefit more from such instruction than can those at a higher level of ability.

Further, the TOEIC course was a substitute for the standard general English course which might have placed greater emphasis on English for communicative purposes. Forcing students to study TOEIC preparatory material might, therefore, be doing them a disservice if communicative ability is the goal of the program.

Care needs to be taken when applying these findings to other teaching situations. Further studies are required to confirm whether these results apply to students of other nationalitities, differing levels of ability or motivation or in other educational setttings such as in-company training programs and language schools.

References
Alderson, J. Charles, (1986). Innovations in Language Testing, in Portal, M. (ed.), 93-105.

Alderson, J.C. & Wall, D. (1993). Does washback exist? Applied Linguistics, 14, 115-129.

Alderson, J.C. & Hamp-Lyons, L. (1996). "TOEFL preparation courses: a study of washback." Language Testing 13, 3, 280-297.

Amer, Aly Anwer (1993). "Teaching EFL students to use a test-taking strategy." Language Testing 10, 1, 71-78. [-20-]

Bachman, Lyle F., (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Becker, B. J. (1990). Coaching for the Scholastic Aptitude Test: Further synthesis and appraisal. Review of Educational Research, 60, 373-417.

Cooley, W.W. (1991). Statewide student assessment. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 10, 3-6.

Darling-Hammond, L. and Wise, A.E., (1985). Beyond standardization: state standards, and school improvement. The Elementary School Journal 85, 315-36.

DerSimonian, R. and Laird, N. M. (1983). "Evaluating the effect of coaching on SAT scores: A meta-analysis." Harvard Educational Review, 53, 1-15.

Frederickson, J.R. (1984). The real test bias: influences of testing on teaching and learning. American Psychologist 39, 193-202. Frederickson, J.R. and Collins, A. (1989). A systems approach to educational testing. Educational Researcher 18, 27-32.

Haladnya, T.M., Nolan S.B. and Haas, N.S. (1991). Raising standardized achievement test scores and the origins of test score pollution. Educational Researcher 20, 2-20.

Henning, Grant (1990). "Priority Issues in the Assessment of Communicative Language Abilities", Foreign Language Annals, 23:5 October 1990, 379-384.

Hughes, A. (1988). Introducing a needs-based test of English language proficiency into an English-medium university in Turkey. In Hughes, A., ed., 134-153.

Hughes, A., ed. (1988). Testing English for university study. ELT Document 127, London: Modern English Publications.

Johnson S. T., Asbury, C. A., Wallace M. B., Robinson S. & Vaughn J. (1985). "The effectiveness of a program to increase Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of Black students in three cities." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education, Chicago, April 1985.

Khaniya, T.R. (1990). Examinations as instruments for educational change: investigating the washback effect of the Nepalese English exams. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh.

Kulik, J.A. Bangert-Drowns, R.L. & Kulik, C.C. (1984). Effectiveness of coaching for aptitude tests. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 179-188.

Madaus, G.F. (1988). The influence of testing on the curriculum. In Travers, L., editor, Critical issues in curriculum (87th yearbook of the Society for the Study of Education), Part 1, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 83-121.

Messick, S and Jungeblut, A. (1981). Time and method in coaching for the SAT. Psychological Bulletin, 89, 191-216.

Morrow, K. (1986). The evaluation of tests of communicative performance, in Portal(ed).

Portal, M. (ed.). Innovations in Language Testing. London: NFER/Nelson. [-21-]

Powers, Donald E.(1993). Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, Summer 1993, 24-31.

Smith. M.L., Edelsky, C., Draper, K., Rottenberg, C. and Cherland, M. (1989). The role of testing in elementary schools. Los Angles, CA: Center for Research on Educational Standards and Student Tests, Graduate School of Education, UCLA.

Swain, M. (1985). Large-scale communicative testing in Lee, Yp Fok, C.Y.Y., Lord, R. and Low, G. (eds) New Directions in Language Testing. Hong Kong: Pergamon Press.

Vernon, P.E. (1956). The Measurement of Abilities (2nd edn.) London: University of London Press.

Wall, D. and Alderson, J.C. (1993). Examining Washback: the Sri Lankan Impact Study, Language Testing 10, 41-70.

Wesdorp, H. (1982). Backwash effects of language testing in primary and secondary education. Stichting Centrum voor onderwijsonderzoek van de Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowlege the generous assitance of Steve Ross, who offered advice at every stage of this project, from its inception to the final report.

We would like to thank the following organizations for their assistance with this research:

The Chauncey Group International Ltd. and IIEC(Japan) for the funding that made this research possible;

Oxford University Press and Addison-Wesley/Longman for generously allowing us to duplicate the tapes of their texts locally at a reduced rate for research purposes.

About the Authors
Thomas N. Robb received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawai'i. He is a professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kyoto Sangyo University. He is a past president of JALT and former member of the TESOL Executive Board.

Jay Ercanbrack received his M.A. in ESL from the University of Hawai'i. He is an Associate Professor in the English Language Education and Research Center at Kyoto Sangyo University. He regularly serves as an examiner for the British Council, Kyoto.

Bruce Johnstone - Cost Sharing

The economics and politics of cost sharing in higher education: comparative perspectives*1

D. Bruce Johnstone,

428 Baldy Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
Received 8 August 2003; accepted 5 September 2003. Available online 18 May 2004.

Abstract
Cost-sharing, or the shift in at least part of the higher educational cost burden from governments (or taxpayers) to parents and students, is a worldwide trend manifested in the introduction of (or in sharp increases in) tuition fees, user charges for lodging and food, and in the diminution of student grants. The phenomenon is seen even in Europe, which still remains the last bastion of generally “free” higher education, as well as in countries that were once Marxist and that are finding loopholes to retain the legal semblance of free higher education while becoming increasingly dependent on tuition revenue for the financial survival of their institutions. This paper examines the rationales for cost-sharing as well as the continuing ideological, political, and technical opposition to it, even in the face of extreme austerity and the virtual inevitability of higher educational revenue diversification, including some forms of cost-sharing, in most countries.

Author Keywords: Costs; Educational economics; Educational finance; Grants; Student financial aid

I. Health; Education; Welfare
Article Outline
1. Introduction
1.1. Cost-sharing in higher education
1.2. The government
1.3. Parents
1.4. Students
1.5. Individual or institutional donors
2. Forms of cost-sharing
3. Examples of cost-sharing and its worldwide growth
4. The rational[s] for cost-sharing
5. The politics of cost-sharing
References
1. Introduction
Higher education at the beginning of the 21st century has never been in greater demand, both from individual students and their families, for the occupational and social status it is presumed to convey, and from governments, for the public benefits it is presumed to bring to the social, cultural, and economic well being of countries. However, higher education is also costly, especially when its high unit, or per-student, costs are magnified by dramatically increased enrollment pressures. Governments are also besieged with other pressing public needs, many of which seem more politically compelling than the claims of higher education and which, together with higher education, greatly exceed, in almost all countries, the available scarce public revenues.

The result is an increasing sense of austerity within the higher educational systems of most countries and a heightened appreciation of the importance of other-than-governmental revenue. In addition, higher education in many countries is under attack for its alleged lack of accountability, or seeming non-responsiveness, whether to the student, the ministry, or business and industry.

From these inter-related problems and perceptions comes the concept of cost sharing. As articulated in its international comparative perspective by Johnstone, 1986; Johnstone, 1991; Johnstone, 1992; Johnstone, 2002 and Johnstone, 2003) cost-sharing refers to a shift of the higher educational cost burden from exclusive or near exclusive reliance on government, or taxpayers, to some financial reliance upon parents and/or students, either in the form of tuition fees or of “user charges” to cover the costs of formerly governmentally- or institutionally-provided room and board. This article is about the worldwide trend toward greater cost-sharing: its principal forms, its economic and policy rationales, some examples in illustration, and some thoughts about the politics of cost-sharing, or why a trend so seemingly ascendant, rational, and even necessary is still so controversial. The article concludes with a discussion of three particularly thorny issues with which policy makers worldwide are contending.

1.1. Cost-sharing in higher education
The term cost-sharing, in reference to higher education, begins with an assumption that the costs of higher education in all countries and in all situations can be viewed as being borne by four principal parties: (1) the government, or taxpayers; (2) parents; (3) students; and/or (4) individual or institutional donors.1

1.2. The government
Most economists in market-oriented economies prefer to view the source of public revenue not as “government”, but as people who pay taxes. Taxes can be paid by most citizens directly and visibly, as in taxes upon earnings, property, retail sales, general consumption, or special goods such as gasoline, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, airline travel, or imported goods. Or, taxes can be paid indirectly and largely invisibly. Such indirect taxes, largely invisible to the average citizen, may originate with taxes on businesses or enterprises that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on the products they eventually buy—not unlike any other kind of retail sales, or special excise, taxes. If prices are governmentally controlled, as used to be the case in most Socialist systems, and if the enterprises are therefore unable to pass along their taxes in the form of higher prices, these enterprise, or value added, taxes must instead be borne by employees in the form of lower wages and salaries. Finally, the government may take purchasing power from citizens not by taxation at all, but by merely printing money, thus shifting purchasing power to the government via deficit-driven inflation and the resulting erosion of the actual value of wages and assets. (Governments may attempt to tax only the rich, or only the large multinational corporations, or only their export-earning extractive industries. But such taxation is very difficult, and in the absence of enormous oil or other mineral earnings to confiscate and/or tax, most governmental expenditures are borne, in the end, by the average citizen / taxpayer.)

1.3. Parents
The second party to cost-sharing is the parents, who may pay some of the costs of higher education through payment of tuition, or bear some of the costs of student living, sometimes by keeping the student at home. Parents can cover these extra costs from their current income, or in part from past savings, or even in part through borrowing—that is, drawing on future earnings. Grandparents or other members of an extended family, or even members of a village or a church, can also be “parents” when it comes to supporting a student.

1.4. Students
The third party to share the burden of higher educational costs is the student, who can bear some of the costs through term-time or summer vacation earnings, or through loans. The loans, in turn, can be paid back when the student has graduated and is employed, like any regular loan, in monthly installments, or repaid through deductions that the employer removes from the graduate’s pay (like the withholding of income taxes, or contributions to an insurance or pension fund) and forwards to the lender. Repayments can also be income contingent, or limited to a certain percentage of earnings. Or in very similar fashion, the graduate can repay the loan (assuming the loan was borrowed from, and therefore owed to, the government) through an income surtax, or additional tax on income until the loan has been repaid, including the contracted percentage interest. In all cases—conventional equal installment, installments graduated over time, or income contingent—what is most critical to the student (or at least ought to be in an informed and rational world) is not the form of the loan or of the repayment obligation, but (1) the discounted present value of the total anticipated payments and (2) the number of years to repay—which, in association with #1 defines the monthly repayment burden.

1.5. Individual or institutional donors
The last party to cost-sharing is the donor, whose contributions may go either toward improving the quality of the university (and thus presumably the educational experience), toward the overall institutional budget (thus reducing the amount that must be passed on to parents and students directly), or toward some students, in the form of grants or scholarships, presumably in substantial measure based on the students’ financial need, or the students’ and/or their parents’ low income. These donors may be long since deceased but whose substantial past gifts to the university have been preserved as endowments (as is common in the US), with only the income earned spent for scholarships or for the current operating budget to reduce the need for other sources of revenue. These donations, in effect, go on in perpetuity. Or, donors may be individuals or foundations giving currently, thus lowering the higher educational costs that would otherwise have to be borne by one or more of the other parties in our cost-sharing paradigm. The university itself may seem to be a donor as it grants special need-based scholarships to able students from poor families. But the actual donors in such instances are more likely to be the parents of wealthier students, who may be paying more than they would otherwise be required to meet the institution’s real average instructional costs, but who may perceive the university’s ability to give some need-based scholarships as essential to enhancing the quality and prestige of the institution—and thus as a legitimate institutional expense.

2. Forms of cost-sharing
The term cost-sharing as it has come to be used in higher educational finance, and as used in this paper, refers to the shift of at least some of the higher educational cost burden from government, or taxpayers, to parents and students. Cost-sharing is most associated with tuition and with fees or “user charges”, especially on governmentally- or institutionally-provided room and board. However, a policy shift in the direction of greater cost-sharing can take one or more of seven main forms:

1. The beginning of tuition (where higher education was formerly free). This would be the case in China in 1997, for example, or Britain in 1998, or as most recently announced (in November 2000 to begin in 2001) in Austria.
2. The addition of a special tuition-paying track while maintaining free higher education for the regularly admitted, state supported students. Such a dual tuition fee track preserves the political appearance of free higher education, which is particularly important (and frequently enshrined in a constitution or a framework law) in formerly Marxist countries such as Russia, most of East and Central Europe, and other countries that were once part of the former Soviet Union., 2
3. The very sharp rise in tuition (where public sector tuition already exists). A shift in the direction of greater cost-sharing requires that the rise in tuition be greater than the rise in institutional costs generally in order for the government’s, or taxpayer’s, share to be lessened, and the parent’s and/or student’s shares to rise commensurately. This has been the case recently in the US, where many state governments have failed to maintain their former “shares” of public university expenses and where public university tuitions have thus had to increase very rapidly to “fill in” the gaps left by the withdrawal of state government funding.
4. The imposition of “user charges”, or fees, to recover the expenses of institutionally provided and formerly heavily subsidized residence and dining halls. This has been happening in China and in most countries, including African countries where subsidized living costs were said by the World Bank (1994) to absorb the bulk of many country’s higher educational budgets. In the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, for example, where higher education remains “free”, the expenses of higher education are exclusively the costs of student living, which are very high in those countries, and which are “shared” neither by the taxpayer nor (at least officially) by the parents. They are thus borne entirely by the students, largely in the form of student loans (which are indirectly shared somewhat by the taxpayer in the form of repayment subsidies).
5. The diminution of student grants or scholarships. This is sometimes accomplished simply by “freezing” grant or loan levels, or holding them constant in the face of general inflation, which then erodes their real value. This happened to the once very generous grants in Britain (which were later abandoned altogether), and has happened to the value of the maintenance grants in Russia and most of the rest of the former Soviet republics, and in Eastern and Central Europe.
6. An increase in the effective cost recovery on student loans. This can be accomplished through a diminution of the subsidies on student loans (similar to the diminution in the value of non-repayable grants), and might be accomplished through an increase in interest rates, or a reduction in the length of time that interest is not charged, or through a reduction in the numbers of loans for which the repayments, for any number of reasons, are forgiven. Or the effective cost recovery might be accomplished through a tightening of collections, or a reduction in the instances of default, with no change in the effective rates of interest paid by those who were repaying anyway.
7. The limitation of capacity in the low or tuition free public sector together with the official encouragement (and frequently a public subsidization) of a tuition-dependent private higher education sector. A number of countries—notably Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and other countries in Latin America and East Asia—have avoided much governmental expenditure on higher education by keeping a limited public sector—usually elite and selective—and shifting much of the costs of expanded participation to parents and students through encouraging private (often profit-making) higher educational institutions.

3. Examples of cost-sharing and its worldwide growth
As seen above, cost-sharing takes on many different forms. But in whatever form or forms, cost-sharing is generally increasing throughout the world at the start of the 21st century—as in:

1. The US, where the costs of higher education—high and rapidly rising over time to begin with—have been rising even faster in the share that is borne by parents and students as the share traditionally borne by governments, or taxpayers, has been diminishing. Public sector tuitions and fees as reported by the College Board (2002) and as analyzed for their appropriateness by Johnstone (2001) vary widely (mainly by state and type of institution rather than by degree program), but range for undergraduates from a low of around $2000 to a high of $5000 and more (and at least double that amount for students from another state). Total expenses to students range from a low of about $5000 for students at community colleges living with their parents, to highs ranging from $35,000 to $40,000 a year living in residence or independently at a prestigious private college or university. The US, however, has extensive programs, both at the state and federal levels of government, and from the colleges and universities themselves, of “need-based”, or “means-tested” grants and minimally subsidized loans, such that all students can afford at least the public college or university, and the most able students, regardless of the income of their family, can be assured of sufficient financial assistance to attend the most expensive institution, albeit with extensive loans and part-time employment.
2. The UK in 1997 became the first European country to impose more than a nominal tuition fee—although it is still low by US public college and university standards. The tuition fee in England and Wales is more than $1500 and can be covered by need-based grants and loans, to be repaid as a portion of their earnings, or “income contingently”. The Government, in the form of a white paper that is “on the table” in the year 2003, is proposing to replace this “up front” tuition fee with a tuition fee that would be deferred for all students and repaid after graduation at a rate of interest equivalent to the increase on the general cost of living (i.e. a zero real rate of interest). This would make England and Wales much closer to the cost-sharing arrangement in Scotland, which was allowed in 2001 to replace its “up front” tuition fee (paid for by parents, albeit means-tested) with a mandatory income contingent loan (paid for by students), called a “contribution” to the Scottish University Endowment Fund.
3. Australia, inaugurated the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in 1989, officially described as a “… fair and equitable way of ensuring that students contribute to the cost of their higher education”. The tuition in 2001 was about $2600 (US) for undergraduate arts and sciences, but could be borrowed and repaid as an income contingent loan at a rate of interest—like that proposed for the UK—that would mirror the prevailing Australian rate of inflation.
4. In much of Latin America, as well as much of East Asia, cost-sharing and revenue diversification generally have taken the form of increasing reliance on a tuition and fee-dependent private higher education sector (where the public universities continue to feature either no, or very low, tuition). This leads to the anomaly of students from upper and upper-middle income families, frequently benefiting from vastly superior (and often private) secondary education, and thus able to pass the rigorous public university entrance examinations, attending “free”, while “ordinary” students, and students from middle and lower-middle income and rural families are either excluded altogether, or are forced to pay for tuition-dependent and frequently inferior higher education. This questionable equity continues to put pressure on government to find a way to shift some of the higher education cost burden on to families and students in the public sector.
5. Russia, where higher education by law must be without cost to the student, in the early years of the 21st century is securing up to 50 percent of all university revenue from tuition through the dual track tuition, described above. This was also a “legal loophole” used by the Chinese prior to 1997 before they dropped the dual track tuition fee in favor of a unitary tuition policy out of a concern for the awkwardness and the potential for abuse in a system that made such a momentous distinction between students all of whom were deemed able to enter and complete a higher education.
6. India, where tuition-supported private higher education is growing and where the several official commissions have reported and recommended the inauguration of some limited cost-sharing, still cannot (as of 2003) openly embrace even the concept, much less the actual implementation of an official policy of tuition fees.
7. China, also still officially a Socialist country, in which higher education was once assumed to be just another part of the vast public sector, like health care or retirement pensions, the costs of which were supposed to be born by the government, charges tuition to nearly all students in the neighborhood of 3500–5000 Yuan (US$400–600). New forms of student loans and means-tested grants in 2003 are only being developed, as reported by Shen and Li (2003).

What these and countless other illustrations show is that governments throughout the world are embracing—however tentatively and frequently with euphemisms and political “spin”—some version of cost sharing in the form of tuition, user fees, and official encouragement of a tuition-dependent private higher education sector.

4. The rational[s] for cost-sharing
The rationale in favor of some cost-sharing may take several forms. To some, a shift of some of the cost burden to those parents who can afford to pay—and providing there are means-tested grants for those who are unable to contribute—is a step in the direction of greater equity. This is the classic argument of the market-oriented neo-liberal economist who views the flourishing growth of private, tuition-dependent higher education worldwide as a clear signal that both parents and students perceive great private value in higher education and therefore ought to be expected to contribute something toward its costs, and who views cost-sharing in the public sector as a step in the direction of greater efficiency, responsiveness, and equity. This argument is most compelling when the following four factors are present: (1) higher education is still partaken of by relatively few; (2) those “relative few” are predominantly from upper middle or upper classes; (3) the taxes that the government uses in support of the so-called “free” higher education come from relatively proportional or even regressive taxes on sales or businesses, or from the printing of money (which also falls heavily on the middle and lower classes through the resulting inflation and loss of purchasing power of the currency); and (4) the provision of “need-based”, or “means-tested” grants and generally-available loans is limited. (Conversely, where participation is high and generally unconnected to the income or status of the parents, and/or where the taxes are relatively progressive—that is, falling more heavily on the more affluent—and where there exist both means tested grants and generally available loans, the so-called equity argument for cost-sharing is not as strong).

In addition, and still following a generally neo-liberal economic orientation, cost-sharing can be supported by the presumption of the greater efficiency and responsiveness of markets, at least where there is both competition, and costs to be borne by the consumer. Clearly, there can be too much “consumer responsiveness” in higher education, as in other fields, where the “consumer” (whether the student or the parents) may not be able to judge the value of what is being offered, or may be especially vulnerable to misleading advertising, or to what can only be called “consumer fraud”. But increasingly (and worldwide), the classical university, especially where government has given it a monopoly on high-prestige higher education, and where there is little incentive to become more responsive either to the needs of students and parents or to the needs of the larger society and economy, is being perceived as both unchanging and self-serving. Universities and other institutions of higher education, whether public or private, having to compete for students and to pay consequences for inefficiency and/or unresponsiveness, are thought by this viewpoint to be more likely to provide a good education, at times and in ways desired by the student, rather than to operate mainly for the benefit of government or the convenience of faculty.

Furthermore, where students and their families are paying little or nothing either in tuition or for food or lodging (as was the case for many years in the Soviet Union, China, much of Africa, and most of the rest of the so-called “Communist World”), the students may be too tempted to remain in that status for a very long time, denying the society and the economy the advantage of their potential productivity and presumed enhanced usefulness, whether to themselves or to the state. However, with a little cost sharing—i.e. when both parents and students are paying something and sacrificing other needs—there is at least presumed to be a much greater incentive on the part of the student to study hard and to graduate “on time”.

However, the most compelling—or at least the least ideologically contestable—case for cost-sharing is simply the sheer need for additional higher educational revenue in the face of two perhaps unfortunate, but virtually uncontestable, facts. The first is the dramatic increase in most countries in both the public and private demand for higher education, recognized as a major engine of national economic growth and provider of individual opportunity and prosperity. In many countries, this demand pressure is a function of the sheer demographic increase in the traditional college-age cohort, compounded by the increasing secondary school completion rates, which in turn increases the number of those wanting to go on to higher education, further compounded by an expansion of what may be considered a college-going age cohort to include adults formerly by-passed by the system. This demand pressure is especially felt in low income countries that are still trying to change from “elite” to “mass” tertiary-level participation, at the same time as they are trying to become more economically competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the increase in demand for higher education can also found in countries already at mass or even near-universal participation rates as the average student “consumes” ever increasing amounts of higher or (at least postsecondary) education over his or her lifetime.

Even without this increased enrollment pressure, however, institutions delivering higher education (especially in most developing or low-income countries and in those countries in transition from command to market-driven economies) are already almost certainly suffering from a severe and worsening austerity. Part of this austerity stems from the fact that per-student costs in higher education tend to rise faster than unit costs in the general economy due to the traditional resistance on the part of the academy (institutions and faculty alike) to measures that would increase productivity by substituting capital for labor or by shedding existing, but lower priority, programs and their associated labor costs. But most of the austerity facing higher education in much of the world—again, especially in the developing and the so-called transitional countries—stems from two other conditions. The first is the nearly intractable shortage of available public (taxpayer-based) revenue: a function of the enormous difficulty in most countries of all forms of taxation, particularly where the traditional sources of tax revenues tend to be uncertain, unknown, or able to be hidden or held outside of the country., 3 The second is the growing competition from other, oftentimes more politically compelling, public needs such as elementary and secondary education, public health, housing, public infrastructure, welfare and the social and economic “safety net”, and internal and external security.

5. The politics of cost-sharing
In spite of the increase throughout most of the world in the extent of cost-sharing, the concept remains in most countries politically contested. Some of the opposition is undoubtedly self-serving: that is, based on the natural and expected opposition to a policy that would impose a fee where none had been imposed before, or that would charge tuition to those (whether students or their parents) who have come to expect that expensive higher education is their entitlement. But more fundamental and serious resistance to cost-sharing can be conceptualized in three distinct, although interrelated, forms: (a) technical, (b) strategic, and (c) ideological.

The technical opposition to, or argument against, cost-sharing is not that it should not work, but that it most often does not, and probably cannot work—at least not in the less-industrialized countries. For cost-sharing to work as its proponents argue it can and should—that is, not diminishing, and quite likely enhancing, equitable access to higher education—requires both need-based, or means-tested, grants (in order to make up for the presumably missing parental contributions from those parents too poor to contribute), as well as loans for students to borrow against their future (presumably greater) earnings. The highly industrialized countries have the technical means to accomplish these two features, including the following:

• pervasive and generally workable income tax systems with high degrees of voluntary compliance that capture most sources of taxable income and allow reasonably reliable calculation and monitoring of family means, or need;
• ways to keep track of people’s movements, including a wide-ranging postal system with “skip-tracing” capabilities, and official and enforced employee identification;
• systems of withholding at the point of wage and salary payment that can facilitate student loan repayments (especially of the income contingent varieties); and
• effective systems of governmental guarantees, and primary and secondary private capital markets, that together are able to allow private savings to supplement public revenue (thus providing a real alternative to dependence on tax revenue).

Opponents to cost-sharing (e.g. Buchert and King, 1995 and Colclough and Manor, 1991) maintain that the absence of these advanced systems make need-based grants and widely-available student loans either unworkable altogether or too costly. Proponents of cost-sharing and student loans ( Tekleselassie, 2001) claim that systems to estimate “means”, or “need”, can still be worked out—at least with some rough justice, even in the absence of reliable measures of incomes and assets, with the onus of demonstrating financial need placed upon the family that is claiming it, and with clear penalties for misrepresentation. Also, proponents of student loans in developing countries e.g. Woodhall, 1988; Ziderman and Albrecht, 1995 and Ziderman, 2002) claim that minimization of interest subsidies and vigorous collection efforts can improve student loan recovery rates. Improved recovery rates, in turn, increase the real discounted present value of the loan notes (even if they are only income contingent promises to repay a percentage of future earnings, or promises to pay an income surtax), even if these promises must remain on the government’s books only as assets of dubious value, with no private buyers. But the fact of the matter is that demonstration of means or need is both difficult and probably unreliable in any less industrialized country. And the absence of a private capital market for student loan notes in all but a handful of countries (mainly the US) does restrict the volume of student lending to amounts that the government can provide out of taxation or deficit financing, limiting the ability of a student loan program truly to substitute for scarce public revenue.

A second type of resistance to cost-sharing may be termed strategic. This is an opposition based not on a presumed difficulty, or cost-ineffectiveness, of implementation, nor on grounds of ideology, but on the assumption that the political acceptance of cost-sharing disadvantages higher education relative to competing claims on public revenue. This view acknowledges that there are always far more legitimate claims on the public treasury than any government can possibly satisfy. And it grants that some claims are equal to, and sometimes more compelling than, the claim for public revenue for higher education. But the strategic opposition to cost-sharing argues that the presumption of higher education’s greater ability to supplement its public revenue needs with private revenues—including but not limited to cost-sharing—is misleading, and makes the denial of public funds to higher education “politically too easy”. In the fierce competition for scarce public revenue, it places higher education at a great disadvantage relative to, say, basic education, health, welfare, or even national defense, none of which can so seemingly easily supplement public revenues with its own fees.

A similar, also essentially strategic, rationale for opposition to cost-sharing is that, while the concept of high tuition-high aid in theory can increase the total amount of resources available to higher education while preserving access and equity, the political fact is that politicians, faced with many claims on scarce public revenues, and given the increasingly conservative politics in many countries, may, according to Johnstone (1993) like the high tuition part much more than the high aid part of the theoretical formula. The result may be higher and higher tuitions to meet the needs of the state for revenue supplementation, but without the higher levels of assistance required to meet the needs of low income students and families. Proponents of cost-sharing argue that this may all be true, but that the greater capability of higher education (relative, say, to basic education) to supplement its public revenue with private revenue is well known and cannot be ignored or denied, and that the case for very low or no tuition is so weak (and even so seemingly self-serving) that it can actually detract from higher education’s legitimate case for public revenue.

A third form of resistance to cost-sharing, and probably the most important and fundamental, is ideological. This opposition draws on a range of views, all of which, to varying degrees, may be labeled critical: of markets; of the private ownership of capital; of the international mobility of capital, production, and trade (i.e. globalization); and of the acceptance of continuing social and economic inequalities. This view, embracing many varieties of neo-Marxism and socialism, emphasizes overwhelmingly the public, or social, benefits to higher education and generally disregards, or would actually diminish, its private returns, especially in the form of the greater earnings presumed to flow from more education. Higher education, at least in the form found in most countries, and especially in its more selective or advanced forms, is viewed in substantial measure as an instrument for the intergenerational perpetuation of status and power—and especially so if it is to be rationed in part by price (i.e. tuition).

To the neo-liberal economic notion that “free” higher education is actually inequitable in that it tends to be paid for by all, while partaken of disproportionately by the wealthy, the critical opposition to cost-sharing counters that this inequitable situation must be solved by far more fundamental economic, political, and social restructuring, featuring not a smaller, but a much larger, public sector, and far more of the total production of goods and services both determined and distributed by the government rather than the market. Reliance on tuition, in this view, feeds upon itself, opening the door to the ever higher tuitions (or ever lower public subsidies), furthering the marketization of all of higher education, and diminishing the importance of learning that is “merely cultural” or not otherwise translatable to a better job and higher pay. Higher education, in this view, ought to be free to all students (and thus to all parents) and free from all (or at least most) market pressures.

The critical view also rejects the conventional neo-liberal economic notion that public revenue is fundamentally limited and probably becoming more so, and that the alternative to at least some additional cost-sharing is either a limitation of higher educational capacity or an increasingly shabby public higher education—in either case to the disadvantage of those least academically able and/or affluent. To the critical view, what only seems to be a fundamental limitation to state tax capacity, rather, is some combination of: (a) the lack of political will to impose taxes; (b) the lack of governmental tax-collecting efficiency and/or integrity; (c) an excess of private ownership (which makes taxation both more politically unpopular and more difficult); and (d ) the acceptance and encouragement of the greater international mobility of capital and productive capacity (i.e. globalization), which in turn allows individuals and corporations to shift taxable income and assets to lower tax jurisdictions.

The politics of cost-sharing, like the politics of most everything else, is a veritable stew of differing priorities, ideologies, self-interest, trust (or the absence thereof) in government, and belief in the capacity of government to implement policy with integrity and cost-effectiveness. This is especially the case in the less industrialized countries as well as those like China that are rapidly industrializing but that still face enormous unmet public needs including the expansion of higher educational participation. In the end, the most compelling case for cost-sharing in higher education, at least as an appropriate policy direction, is the argument that governmental tax capacities are limited. The case is made even more compelling by the view, particularly in the less industrialized world, that even if tax capacities were not so limited—i.e. even if public revenues could be greatly increased—higher education is no longer (if it ever was) near the head of the queue of public needs. The demonstrably serious public underfunding of basic education, public health, sanitation, public economic infrastructure, housing, environmental preservation and restoration, and economic “safety nets” are probably both politically and substantively more compelling than higher education.

This is not to diminish the case for public revenue for higher education, whether publicly or privately “owned”. Some amount and form of higher education is still fundamental to individual opportunities and the personal fulfillment of most persons, regardless of the private returns captured in higher earnings. Higher education, publicly funded, is still essential to most forms of basic research, to the preservation and transmission of culture, and to the strengthening of civic society. Cost-sharing cannot achieve these things.

Furthermore, cost sharing, to be compatible with access and equality, must be accompanied by policies and programs of financial assistance, other programs to compensate for unequal educational opportunities at the secondary level, and reforms in both curriculum and pedagogy. The two especially thorny problems of determining the appropriate parental contribution (and thus of measuring the remaining need) and of recovering costs from graduates in the form of loan repayments or income surtaxes must continue to receive the attention of scholars and government policy analysts alike.

In the end, cost-sharing may be better viewed as a concept and a general policy direction than a specific policy prescription or agenda. There have been many false starts and even failures, particularly in the realms of tuition policies and student loan programs. But the extraordinary need for, and general popularity of, higher education, plus the apparent limitation of public revenues and the ever more fierce competition for these scarce public revenues means that the goal of cost-sharing will continue to intrigue politicians and policy analysts, even in the face of inevitable political opposition. A deeper and more appreciative understanding of the politics of cost-sharing should help this policy agenda.

References

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Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-716-645-2471 , ext. 1092; fax: +1-716-645-2481.

*1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the International Conference on the Economics of Education held at Peking University, Beijing China in May 2001. Additional papers on cost-sharing may be found [2003–2004] on the project website at http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/org/IntHigherEdFinance/.

1 Although enterprises or businesses may also provide revenue, such contributions are either highly restricted, corresponding more to the purchase of a special service, or in the form of general support (and at all substantial) can be viewed as adding to the cost of the product and therefore ultimately borne by the consumer—not unlike a general tax upon the business.

2 Interestingly, China, which began with a dual track tuition fee, changed to a universal tuition fee in 1997.

3 For example, taxes were relatively easy to collect in centrally controlled economies such as the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the so-called collapse of Communism, where purchasing power could be siphoned off at each level of the state-owned production processes via “turnover,” or other forms of value-added, taxes. The state could also control—and thus tax—all international trade. Privatization and globalization have essentially eliminated these largely invisible and easy-to-collect taxes, and the alternatives—e.g. taxes on income, retail sales, property, and the sales of luxury goods—are visible, unpopular, expensive, relatively easy to avoid, and technically (in addition to politically) difficult to collect.