I hate that we should go to hospital and wait… You wait a long time. In hospital you should be very patient to be a patient.~ male, 31 years, PhD in computing, China
(1994). The problem of ‘transferable’ skills. Melbourne Studies in Education: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 4-28.
"Chapter 23: Strategizing and Ordering the Global" published on 30 Sep 2011 by Edward Elgar Publishing.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Strategies to enhance socio‐economic equity in higher education embody one or both of two objectives. The first strategy is to advance ‘fairness’ by changing the composition of participation, bringing higher education into line with the ideal model of a socially representative system. The second strategy advances ‘inclusion’ by broadening the access and completion of under‐represented groups. Governments often focus on both objectives. For example current Australian policy mentions both objectives while giving priority to fairness. But as Amartya Sen notes, the two approaches embody heterogeneous traditions of social justice. They also have diverging implications for freedom, and for social status in education (the ‘elephant in the room’). The utopian fairness approach emphasises the proper functioning of institutions. The realist inclusion approach emphasises the agency of those excluded. OECD country experience suggests that while measures of fairness provide useful information, a programmatic focus on enhanced inclusion is both more achievable and more fruitful.
Higher education — particularly the research-intensive university, which is the focus of this article — is the subject of global/national/local effects, and is shaped by hierarchy and uneven development on a world scale. The article theorises social competition in higher education, and traces inter-university competition and stratification on the national and global planes with the help of figures and tables. It argues that social competition is much broader than economic exchange, but in the neo-liberal era marketisation is becoming more important, particularly cross-border markets. Globalisation and markets together are changing the competition for status goods (positional goods) in higher education. The competition is becoming more ‘economised’ because mediated by private capacity to pay, and intensified because there is diminished attention to public good objectives such as equality of opportunity: in any case transnational markets are configured as a trading environment where such objectives are irrelevant. The outcome is the steepening of university hierarchies, the formation of a ‘winner-take-all’ world market in elite and mostly American university education, a tighter fit between social hierarchy and educational hierarchy at the national level, and global patterns of domination/subordination that are as yet scarcely modified by global public goods. This suggests the need to rework the equality of the educational project and situate it globally as well as nationally.
This survey provides unprecedented scope and detail of analysis on higher education in the Asia-Pacific region. In this era of global integration, convergence and comparison, the balance of power in worldwide higher education is shifting. In less than two decades the Asia-Pacific region has come to possess the largest and fastest growing higher education sector on Earth. The countries of East and Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific together enrol 50 million tertiary students, compared to 14 million in 1991, and will soon conduct a third of all research and development. In China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, ‘world-class’ universities are emerging at breakneck pace, fostered by modernizing governments that see knowledge and skills as key to a future shaped equally by East and West, and supported by families deeply committed to education.But not all Asia-Pacific countries are on this path, not all reforms are effective, and there are marked differences between nations in levels of resources, educational participation, research, state controls and academic freedom. Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific: Strategic responses to globalization provides an authoritative survey of tertiary education in this diverse and dynamic region. Its 23 chapters, written by authors from a dozen different countries, focus successively on the Asia-Pacific as a whole, the strategies of individual universities, and national policies and strategies in response to the global challenge.
This book argues that the vocational contribution of the generalist higher education courses in arts and science can be improved, without impairing the educational role of these academic disciplines. The study investigates whether a competency-based approach to generalist education is desirable and feasible. It also looks at other ways of improving the relationship between generalist higher education and work.
Przez ponad dwie dekady rządy na całym świecie, ukierunkowane na realizację polityki wywodzącej się z anglojęzycznej sfery politycznej, dostosowywały podległe sobie systemy szkolnictwa wyższego do podręcznikowych przykładów postaci rynków. Reformy, w ramach których zachodziły te procesy, obejmowały korporatyzację, wprowadzanie konkurencyjnych mechanizmów finansowania, opłat dla studentów, standaryzacji wyników pracy oraz raportowania jej efektów. Niemniej żaden z krajów nie stworzył autentycznych mechanizmów gospodarki rynkowej w ramach kształcenia krajowych studentów na pierwszym stopniu. Żaden uniwersytet badawczy nie jest kierowany przez interesariuszy, napędzany motywem zysku, zwiększeniem udziału w rynku, efektywnością alokacji zasobów ani nie uważa, by praca odbywająca się w jego ramach przybierała formę towarową. Rynkowo określane czesne funkcjonuje jedynie w odniesieniu do niektórych form kształcenia zawodowego i kształcenia studentów zagranicznych. Podczas gdy zaostrzanie się konkurencji, przedsiębiorczość czy mówienie o konsumentach dominuje w szkolnictwie wyższym, kapitalizm nie jest istotną częścią jego krajobrazu. Co najwyżej mamy do czynienia z quasi-rynkami, jak w przypadku Wielkiej Brytanii po reformach Browne’a. Sytuacja ta różni się od doświadczeń wielu krajów w zakresie prywatyzacji i komercjalizacji transportu, sieci komunikacyjnych, radia i telewizji czy ubezpieczeń zdrowotnych. W niniejszym artykule twierdzę, że autentyczna reforma rynkowa w szkolnictwie wyższym skrępowana jest przez ograniczenia wpisane w istotę tego sektora (dobra publiczne, konkurencja o status) oraz polityczne czynniki powiązane z tymi ograniczeniami. Sugeruję tym samym, że reforma rynkowa jest utopią, a jej abstrakcyjne wyobrażenie podtrzymywane jest ze względów politycznych, które nie są związane z sektorem (np. ograniczeń fiskalnych, potrzeby państwowej kontroli czy porządkowania treści sektora). Jeśli jednak kapitalistyczne rynki są czymś nieosiągalnym w szkolnictwie wyższym, to potrzebujemy bardziej realnego planu modernizacji.
The Climate-Nature Emergency (CNE) is an existential crisis that makes urgent the need to fundamentally transform the dominant model of social and economic development. Amid the wreckage created by competitive accumulation and hyper consumption, the crucial need is to develop a sustainable moral order, embodying constructive human-nature and human-human relations. Following Durkheim, the main components of a moral order are the state, which is the crucial repository of collective interest, and individuals who take responsibility for self-improvement and the implementation of social values. The CNE foregrounds the capacity of states everywhere to both organise centrally and foster devolved community agency that can effectively address local problems and disasters. Working with government, higher education has a central role to play in advancing and defending science, fostering skills and knowledge in government, and in developing reflexive agents effective in social action in all of the local, communal, national, regional and global scales. The CNE also calls up the need to overhaul the curriculum to render it consistent with ecological survival. Higher education has an advanced capacity to cooperate across national borders and can assist nation-states in the difficult but vital process of building stable global cooperation. In addressing these issues, China and higher education in China have strong endogenous traditions, ancient and recent, on which to draw, including the consensual role of the Sinic state, which when functioning effectively draws on widespread public support; governance through deep devolution within the framework of central policies; Confucian self-cultivation with its capacity to foster consciously reflective lifelong learners; and tianxia an approach to global cooperation founded in moral values and norms of conduct rather than coercion. When combined with the Western respect for personal freedom and initiative, these qualities have much to offer in addressing the CNE, not only in China but across the world.
In the last two decades the dominant policy model in higher education has been the NPM market model. Most national governments have introduced reforms such as corporatization of institutions, intra-system competition, entrepreneurship, private income raising, contractual planning, output formats, performance reporting, accountability and audit mechanisms. Some features of the model such as competition, output formats and increased private funding have been widely adopted. But functioning capitalist markets have not and will not be created. Commercial tuition markets have been created only in marginal vocational training, and international education. WTO-GATS driven trade liberalization has stalled. Research remains largely in the public domain. The NPM market model is a cul-de-sac. It is blocked by the economic social character of higher education and research: the public good nature of knowledge, the indirect character of most of the economic effects of education, and the character of status competition.
Economic and cultural globalisation has ushered in a new era in higher education. Higher education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital. Even as they share in the reinvention of the world around them, higher education institutions, and the policies that produce and support them, are also being reinvented. For the first time in history every research university is part of a single world-wide network and the world leaders in the field have an unprecedented global visibility and power. Research is more internationalised than before and the mobility of doctoral students and faculty has increased. The specifically global element in academic labour markets has gained weight, especially since the advent of global university rankings. This working paper explores the issues for national policy and for individual institutions. Part I provides an overview of globalisation and higher education and the global responses of national systems and individual institutions of higher education. Part II is focused on certain areas of policy with a strong multilateral dimension: Europeanisation, institutional rankings and typologies and cross-border mobility.
'Elite, Mass, and High-Participation Higher Education' published in 'Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions'
In the last twenty years, Vietnam has taken a more proactive approach to the internationalisation of tertiary education, including higher education. However, despite all the rhetoric about internationalisation being a fundamental priority for Vietnamese higher...
