Changing Higher Education

More on globalization of higher education

There was a recent conference on “Realizing the Global University”, sponsored by a number of higher education organizations including the Worldwide University Network, the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, and the International Association of Universities.  The conference was preceded by a Critical Perspectives Workshop.  David Pilsbury, the CEO of the World University Network (WUN), described the context of these meetings in the following way:

Universities are universal and increasingly international, but they are not yet ‘global’. In a world that is globalising rapidly, in which the central role of universities in the knowledge economy and in civil society is articulated more strongly and more widely than ever, we do not have a clear sense of what it takes or what it means to be a global university. ‘Global’ is among the most overused and least understood words, but at an instinctive level we know that globalisation is a powerful force that is going to impact massively on the evolution of institutions that have been around in a form that is recognisable today since at least the ninth century. Since universities embody so much of what is important to us as individuals and societies, culturally and economically, the outcome of globalisation for universities is crucial.

Copies of papers presented at the Workshop can be found here, and copies of a few of the papers from the conference can be found here.  The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education has a series of excellent position papers on the themes of this conference.  For those of you whose institutions belong to the Observatory, those papers can be found here.

Readers of this blog will know that I share Pilsbury's viewpoint regarding the lack of "globalization" in higher education. The issue of what globalization will mean for higher education is one that I struggle with constantly in this blog.   These papers bring a lot of interesting insights to the table.

I generally don’t regret having missed yet another conference, but this one looks like it was quite worthwhile. 

Another Global Ranking of Higher Education - with a radical twist

A recent article in the Economist informed me that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is planning a new global comparison of universities.   Readers of this blog know my suspicions of national rankings in higher education (see, e.g.Better Rankings-but do we need them? Oct.11, 2006)), and my concerns regarding international rankings are even higher.  A recent post on Beerkins’ Blog has an excellent discussion of the problems with both national and international rankings. However, the OECD comparison will look at the issue from an entirely radical perspective - learning outcomes for the different national systems of higher education!

The Spellings Commission report has engendered considerable discussion in the US regarding the desirability of looking at learning outcomes, and/or whether any useful measures of learning outcomes can be developed considering the multiple goals of higher education (see also Spellings and transparency, Oct. 3, 2006).  While we in US higher education debate this issue at great length, generally making every argument that will forestall it happening, it looks like the OECD is going to move ahead to come up with some global scorecards on effectiveness of national approaches to higher education!