Publications

The research interrogates the connections between information and communication technologies' (ICTs') use and change processes in Australian higher education. The empirical investigation focuses simultaneously on three domains of practice: the educational, the technological and the organizational, with a particular interest in their overlaps and intersections. There were 15 case studies, covering three discipline clusters (Medicine/Health Sciences, Economics and Business, English/Cultural Studies/Communications) in each of five different types of Australian university. The main research technique was semi‐structured interviews with academic, executive and administrative staff, supplemented by focus groups with students and the study of curriculum and strategy documents. The main findings of the study were that the most effective use of ICTs in universities occurs when educational and organizational objectives are in harmony; when ICTs innovations are dominated by corporatist objectives at the expense of pedagogical objectives, benefits are limited and tensions evident; and pedagogical initiatives by discipline‐based ICTs 'champions' require central support if they are to add value on a sustained basis. The optimal conditions for ICTs innovations in teaching and learning are disciplinary independence and capacity, conditions present in only one of the 15 case studies.

This comprehensive book provides a collection of the critical papers that have been published in the fast-growing field of the globalization of higher education. They include work by a variety of noted scholars, such as Altbach, Clark and Marginson, which cover key areas of theoretical and substantive interest. This volume, along with an original introduction, will be of relevance to academics, researchers and students undertaking higher education research, as well as to the wider social science and public policy communities.

No abstract is provided for this article.

In the Anglophone jurisdictions, higher education policy is over-determined by economic policy and subjected to neoliberal regulation based on quasi-market competition between corporatised institutions, regulated by performative comparisons, tuition fees, and outputs imagined as commodities. England installed marketisation in successive policy changes between the Thatcher government’s introduction of commercial fees for international students in 1979 and the full-fee market for domestic students, supported by subsidised income-contingent loans, in 2012. Policy commitment to public good outcomes (the collective and non-pecuniary individual benefits of higher education) was largely emptied out, leaving only attenuated proxies such as widening participation and research impact. Responsibility for public good outcomes was transferred from government to institutions. Following a discussion of Anglophone concepts of ‘public’ and an overview of key policy reports from 1963–2019, the paper reports on qualitative research into approaches to higher education and public good in England. There were 24 semi-structured interviews, with middle and senior manager-leaders in two universities and policy professionals. Nearly all advocated a broad public good role, in contrast to policy in England, and provided examples of public outcomes in higher education. However, these concepts lacked clarity, while at the same time the shaping effects of the market were sharply understood.

Policy debate about whether to maintain public subsidies for higher education has stimulated reconsideration of the public mission of higher education institutions, especially those that provide student places conferring private benefits. If the work of higher education institutions is defined simply as the aggregation of private interests, this evaporates the rationale for higher education institutions as distinctive social foundations with multiple public and private roles. The private benefits could be produced elsewhere. If that is all there is to higher education institutions, they could follow the Tudor monasteries into oblivion. But what is 'public' in higher education institutions? What could be 'public'? What should be 'public'? The paper reviews the main notions of 'public' (public goods in economics, public understood as collective good and Habermas' public sphere) noting the contested and politicised environment in which notions of 'public' must find purchase. A turn to global public goods offers the most promising strategy for re-grounding the 'public' character of higher education.

The first draft of chapters 2 to 9 of Educating Australia was finished in March 1996, one weekend after the election of the Howard Coalition Government promised another lurch in the never very stable settings of education policy. The text was revised again in late 1996 as the Liberal–National agenda in education and elsewhere – new in some respects, familiar in others – was taking shape. However, the book was much longer in the making. Educating Australia is the first fruits from the larger doctoral project on ‘Markets in education’ which preoccupied me from 1988 to 1996. Educating Australia was prepared as a discrete text, a history of government and education in Australia in the postwar period that was designed to situate the emergence of educational markets in the last decade. Chapter 9 provides a hint of the larger project (Marginson 1996a), to be published as Markets in Education (Marginson 1997d). Compared to that study, Educating Australia is less concerned with theory and more with history, with telling the story of education, government, economy and citizen.

International higher education branch campuses (IBCs) in China and elsewhere possess dual identity. There are stakeholders on both the home and host sides.

Human capital theory and broad generalities about market reform are of little use in the day-to-day provision of education. A more promising economic theory is input–output modelling, which looks at the relationship between the resources devoted to education and the outcomes of education. It is unfortunate that some economists have made strenuous efforts to deny that there is a positive relationship between resources and educational outcomes. This chapter looks at the relationship between resources and outcomes (particularly in relation to class sizes), and examines trends in Australian spending on education.

Vygotsky saw mental and cultural development as 'mediated' by artefacts, including tools and signs. He used his 'genetic method' to investigate higher cognitive processes in historical context. These insights are foundational to sociocultural theory, which is widely used in education research. However, since Vygotsky, communicative globalization has changed the conditions of theorization, research, policy and practice. Global convergence is characterized by extensive and intensive flows of people, messages, knowledge, ideas and money, and sudden, multiple and disjunctive changes. Educational activity is 'glonacal' activity, shaped simultaneously in global, national and local spheres. This article argues that nevertheless, once developed to incorporate global phenomena into the genetic method and the notion of mediating artefacts, Vygotsky's ideas have much to offer the analysis of globally affected educational practices. This conceptual approach combines the spatial insights of globalization theory with the socio-historical relational understandings enabled by the genetic method. It is illustrated by a case study on the learning to teach English practices of a cohort of Vietnamese pre-service teachers during their practicum. Global flows, media and artefacts, which are used extensively by these teachers, articulate with national and local practices and conventions in innovative ways.

More than three million students globally are on the move each year, crossing borders for their tertiary education. Many travel from Asia and Africa to English speaking countries, led by the United States, including the UK, Australia and New Zealand where students pay tuition fees at commercial rates and prop up an education export sector that has become lucrative for the provider nations. But the 'no frills' commercial form of tertiary education, designed to minimise costs and maximise revenues, leaves many international students inadequately protected and less than satisfied. International Student Security draws on a close study of international students in Australia, and exposes opportunity, difficulty, danger and courage on a massive scale in the global student market. It works through many unresolved issues confronting students and their families, including personal safety, language proficiency, finances, sub-standard housing, loneliness and racism.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Global higher education can be understood as a field of power configured by (1) nationally-ordered higher education systems; (2) global structures that criss-cross all national systems, for example in English language scientific research and academic publishing; and...

The following paper is an abridged version of the report Education, Work and Economic Renewal commissioned by the Australian Education Union to broaden debate on the future of Vocational Education and Training (VET) and the role of the public sector in shaping it in the future.

This chapter provides and discusses existing comparative data on higher education participation between various countries. The chapter starts with a review of the principal measures of participation, noting an inevitable tradeoff between optimum statistical measures and what is feasible given data limitations. After surveying participation in higher education in all countries, and noting that almost three-quarters have achieved enrolment ratios of at least 15 per cent, the chapter provides more detailed comparisons of the OECD member countries. The chapter proposes a composite Higher Education Participation Index which combines enrolment and output measures.

This chapter provides a summary of the central conclusions of the book. It begins by discussing the lessons of the analysis for the question of managing the global mobility of students, and it discusses in summative form the main findings of the work. The central themes are exposed afresh for the purpose of rounding the discussion off.

“International student security” refers to the international student’s maintenance of a stable capacity for self-determining human agency. The article focuses on the role of English-language proficiency in the security of students from English as Foreign Language countries, drawing on evidence from a program of semistructured interviews with 200 international students. The interviews show that language proficiency is a pervasive factor in the human security of the international students in all domains inside and outside the classroom. There is a strong link between language proficiency and the capacity for active human agency. Both findings confirm prior research literature. The article concludes with implications for practice and for further research.