Education International Research
5. T echnical and Vocational Education and Training and Higher Education Target 4.3 By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university Target 4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship Target 8.6: By 2020, substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training Global participation in tertiary education is on the rise. Participation rates reached 38% in 2017 and now exceed 50% in middle-income countries,84 but the high cost of courses mean that access is not yet equitable. Educators attest that privatisation and managerial reforms in higher education impede quality and can sometimes lead to violations of educators’ right to decent work. There has been increased awareness of the importance of vocational education in recent years, perhaps in part due to its inclusion in the SDGs. In Ghana for instance, TVET has become a key portfolio for the Deputy Minister of Education, providing the sector with increased visibility and resources. In Pakistan, it is reported that the government has made efforts to highlight the importance of TVET through the media. However, in many countries TVET remains underfunded and lacking in quality, deterring potential students.
Affordable versus free — TVET and higher education remain prohibitively expensive for many It is deeply regrettable that SDG 4 refers to “affordable education” even though the Bill of Human Rights calls for higher education to become “progressively free”.85 Education is a human right and public good, and governments should aim to make TVET and higher education universally free and therefore accessible to all, regardless of income. GRO.EI-IE
Since 2015, governments have failed to devote sufficient effort to providing socalled “affordable” TVET and higher education (it remains unclear exactly how “affordability” is defined for target monitoring purposes), and they have done even less to provide free TVET and higher education. As a result, lowincome students are often excluded from engaging in further and higher education. Tertiary education is least affordable in Sub-Saharan Africa, with costs exceeding 60% of the average national income in most countries.86 Some countries have introduced new schemes to enable students to obtain student loans, but this places them at risk of leaving university with large debts. In the US, the NEA87 argues that the government’s reluctance to address “exorbitant and fraudulent” student loans (the country’s collective debt amounts to approximately $1.5 trillion)88 is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving SDG 4. In May 2019, the AFT89 filed a classaction lawsuit against the student loan servicer Navient for misleading borrowers and providing them with insufficient and deceptive information.
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84 UNESCO. 2019. Migration, Displacement and Education. Building Bridges not Walls. Global Education Monitoring Report. p. 145. 85 As emphasised in the Joint Vision for Secondary and Higher Education for All in Europe from EI and the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions (OBESSU) and ESU (the European Student’s Union). Retrieved from: https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/en_joint-vision/8 86 UNESCO. 2019. Migration, Displacement and Education. Building Bridges not Walls. Global Education Monitoring Report. p. 149. Retrieved from: https://en.unesco. org/gem-report/report/2019/migration 87 National Education Union 88 Make Lemonade. 2019. Student Loan Statistics for 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.makelemonade.co/student-loan-debt-statistics/ 89 American Federation of Teachers
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