I recently wrote an article that addressed these provocative questions. It has been accepted for publication in New Directions for Higher Education, to be published by Jossey- Bass. I will just cover some of the main points of the article in this post, and point interested readers to the preprint.
I argued the first premise of this question - that globalization has had a small effect on higher education - by using the taxonomy that Samuel Palmisano defined to classify the stages of industrial globalization (see Globalization and internationalization, June 7, 2006). I argued that most of what occurs in higher education today fits Palmisano’s 19th century “internationalization” model of hub-and-spoke activities. I then described the relatively few activities in higher education that fit the early 20th century “multinational” phase, and the even more uncommon higher education activities that have real parallels with “globalization” as the term is generally used in the business literature. I argued that the “international” activities have little potential to cause major change in higher education, but that both the “multinational” and “globalization” stages have the potential to cause as radical change in higher education as they have in industry generally.
