Changing Higher Education

British Universities in China: the Reality Beyond the Rhetoric

This is the title of a very interesting recent multi-authored discussion paper of Agora, a British think-tank for higher education. Although the paper is about British universities in China, most of what is said carries over directly to everyone’s globalization efforts worldwide. The director of Agora, Anna Fazackerley, provides a thought provoking introduction that provides an excellent context for the rest of the contributions. She points out the importance to institutions of thinking strategically about their globalization efforts, and having a clear understanding of what they hope to gain from them. She also emphasizes that the Chinese are in complete control of the process in their country, and that it is therefore critical to understand what China itself really wants when it allows foreign universities to enter. As part of the answer to this question, she suggests that "It is becoming apparent that one of the main uses of British universities to China will be their expertise in science and engineering".

The paper contains six contributions from individuals have considerable experience with higher education partnerships in China and throughout Asia.  Their comments are all well thought out, and quite thought provoking.  They point out the positives and negatives of working with China, and describe some of the sources of difficulties. The paper concludes with 3 case studies of different models of UK-China higher education partnerships. One of these is about the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Laureate, Jan. 14, 2008).  The other two are the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus,  and the joint degree program between Queen Mary College, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Technology. 

All this makes for very interesting and valuable reading.

Secure Borders and Open Doors

There is an interesting new government report just out entitled Secure Borders and Open Doors .  The Advisory Committee that prepared the report was charged by the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to try to balance the competing demands of securing our borders against threats, and of maintaining the open doors to international visitors that have served us so well in the past. The co-chairs of the Advisory Committee are John S. Chen, Chairman, CEO , and President, Sybase Inc., and Dr. Jared L. Cohon, President, Carnegie Mellon University. 

The report notes that the number of international visitors has dropped off significantly since 9/11, and that our share of transnational students has dropped as well. They make a number of very good recommendations to try to remedy this situation.  In one instance, however, they go beyond  what might be construed as the limits of their charge to make the following excellent observation:

America is losing competitiveness for international
students for one primary reason, and it is not related
to how the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA ) at State is
performing their operational responsibilities. Rather,
it is because our competitors have – and America
lacks – a proactive national strategy that enables us
to mobilize all the tools and assets at our disposal,
and that enables the federal bureaucracy to work
together in a coherent fashion, to attract international
students. Instead, the U.S. effort is characterized by
a bureaucracy that often works at cross purposes

I am not sure that I would be so confident that our loss of international students has nothing to do with the way we hand out visas, but the thrust of this observation is right on target.   I have commented earlier in these posts (see.e.g. Why has globalization had such a small effect on higher education-and when will that change?) that the US is essentially the only advanced country without an extensive strategy for attracting international students.  There is no doubt in my mind that this lack of national strategy is a significant contributor to our declining ability to attract international students.   I hope this  recommendation will stimulate some thought in the halls of power.  It must be noted, however, that earlier, similar recommendations have had no visible impact (see e.g.Are we losing the competition for international students?)

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. 

Real income vs educational level- a problem for higher education

An article in Foreign Affairs, and recent reports from the Pew Trust and ETS all have recently made similar, and very important, points about education and the American economy.  The first article talks about falling real wages and the relationship to protectionism; the Pew Trust looks at decreasing economic mobility in the US, and ETS considers the impacts on the US of a “perfect storm” of divergent skill distributions, the changing economy, and demographic trends.  Taken together, these reports raise some important questions for higher education.

Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J Slaughter, writing in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, discuss generally falling wages in the US, and their connection with increasing protectionism.  They point out that real income growth recently has skewed significantly in favor of high earners, with a strong correlation to educational level. They report:
Less than four percent of workers were in educational groups that enjoyed increases in mean real money earnings from 2000 to 2005; mean real money earnings rose for workers with doctorates and professional graduate degrees and fell for all others....Even college graduates and workers with nonprofessional master’s degrees saw their mean real money earnings decline.
In particular, the mean real earnings of college graduates fell by almost 4% between 2000 and 2005, while the mean real earnings of the MBA, JD, MD group rose by about 10%.  Hardest hit, not surprisingly, were high school dropouts, whose mean real earnings dropped by about 5% over that time period.

Assessing graduate education -with inputs again

Richard Vedder’s blog, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is always interesting, and often provocative. In a recent post, he pointed out an article that I had somehow missed in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a new company called Academic Analytics that has a new approach to ranking graduate programs.  Rather than depending heavily on reputations, as do so many rankings, Academic Analytics uses a variety of productivity measures. The measures used, and the weightings they are given in arriving at a final score, are field dependent to better reflect the ways in which different fields operate. The outcomes are interesting, to be sure, and differ in surprising ways from some of the more traditional rankings.

Report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education

The third draft of the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is out now, and news reports indicate that it is acceptable to most members of the Commission.  Thus it is probably pretty close to the final report, and as such interesting to look at in some detail. 

One of the more confusing aspects of the report is that it is really about just one part of higher education - undergraduate studies.  There is nothing wrong with that focus, but it should have been made clear in the report.  In addition, by leaving out graduate and professional training, and research, many of the discussions about cost containment miss the boat.  More on that below.

At the outset let me say that I think the report hits most of the proper points about the current situation in higher education, and makes a number of suggestions that are in the right directions.  One (especially a professor) can always argue about emphasis and detail, which is mostly what I shall do.

An underlying discomfort I have with the report is that it is only minimally focused on global changes and competition.  There are numerous comparisons of how we compare today with other countries, but no analysis of where the competition is moving tomorrow.  Similarly, there is no mention of the movement up the educational ladder of the offshoring of jobs (see Offshoring moves up the education ladder, March 7, 2006 ), and what that might mean for our educational system.   The report is also focused on domestic students (understandably), and gives rather short shrift to the importance international students play in higher education and our economy generally.  Other countries have recognized importance of international students to their global prestige and general welfare, and have created national strategies to attract the best and brightest (e.g Australia and Great Britain).  No such overall strategy is called for here, although the relatively few recommendations made by the committee in this area have great merit.

How are we doing teaching cognitive skills?

“With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education......Ironically, the fact that college faculties rarely stop to consider what a full-blown commitment to critical thinking would entail may help to explain why they have been so quick to agree on its importance to the undergraduate program.”
Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges (p.109).

We hope that undergraduates will learn many things during their years at the college or university. Some of this new knowledge is related to subject matter, some to moral development, some to psychosocial change.  All of this is important, to be sure, but I must admit that near the top of my priority list come cognitive skills such as critical thinking and postformal reasoning.  Without those skills, I am not sure exactly what students carry away with them. In that light, it is pretty depressing to look at the data on how well we in higher education do in helping our students develop those skills.

A preliminary report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education

The Commission for the Future of Higher Education has just released a draft report, which was apparently prepared by staff, not the Commission members.  Thus we can expect that the Commission will wade in and carry our a significant rewriting.  So, rather than respond to the draft (other than to say that I find some of the things in it to be right on target, and others to be just silly), I will describe a few things I would like to see in the final report.

First, a discussion of the changes they see in the world, and why those changes put our higher education system at risk. There are surely many things wrong with our system of higher education (and those of all of our competitors, for that matter), and we are unlikely to have the enthusiasm or resources to fix them all.  What threats do they believe their solutions are protecting us against? At present, we cannot judge the utility of their solutions, since we do not know the problems for which they are solutions

Second, what should we be teaching students in today’s world? If we want to do outcomes testing of learning, we had better be real sure we are testing for the desired outcomes, because the test will become the driver. Reports show that offshoring is creeping up the educational-attainment ladder.  The key issue seems to me to be, what do today’s students need to learn so that they have a good chance of being successful in the increasingly globalized competition for jobs?

Are we losing the competition for international students?

The National Association of International Educators (NAFSA) has just released a new report Restoring U.S. Competitiveness for International Students and Scholars.  It is an excellent hard-hitting report that deserves wide attention.  It does, however, miss a couple of important issues that I discuss below.

The report notes that the era of robust growth in international student enrollments ended three years age, and that “there are now fewer international students enrolled in U.S. higher education  institutions than there were in the fall of 2001." In addition, senior international scholars are encountering continuing difficulties in coming to the United States, and there is a growing negativity on their part towards this county.  As the report emphasizes, this “intellectual anti-global” stand on the part of the United States has a number of extremely negative implications for our future competitiveness and well-being.

And the leader in R&D is...

As described in my Feb. 17, 2006 post, the World in 2020, a recent report of the National Intelligence Council suggested that only 14 years from now, the engine of the world economy might have shifted from the US to China and other countries in Asia, and that leadership in science and technology might have moved from the US to the same Asian countries.   In a May 16, 2006 post entitled Where is the engine of the world economy?, I called attention to a recent LA Times article that seems to show that China is moving along a path that would enable it to achieve the economic status predicted by the NIC.  The recently released 2006 Science and Education Indicators from the National Science Board would seem to indicate that China is also on track to realizing the NIC predictions in the science and technology area.