Changing Higher Education

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.

Where is the engine of the world economy?

In a Feb.17, 2006 post, the World in 2020, I described how the National Intelligence Council imagined the world might look only 14 years from now.  One of the most powerful suggestions of the NIC report was that the engine of the world’s economy in 2020 would no longer be the United States, but rather that role will have shifted to China and other Asian countries. 

In this light, an article in the May 14 Los Angeles Times entitled Emerging Nations Power World Economic Boom leapt right out at me. In that article, Tom Petruno writes, “Yet this is a different kind of boom from any other in the post-World War II era, analysts say. The soaring economies of China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging nations increasingly are setting the pace, overshadowing the slower growth of the United States, Europe and Japan, where the benefits of the expansion have eluded many workers.”   Numerous statements in the article indicate that the underpinning of the boom in the emerging nations is the buying power of the United States, so one cannot yet take the US out of the driver’s seat.  However, it is obvious that the global economic situation today could be interpreted as a step on the way to the condition predicted for 2020 by the NIC.

De-fragmenting the university

From time-to-time I check the Millennium Project website to see what Jim Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan,  is writing and talking about.  He is one of the most visionary and articulate leaders of higher education today, and you can count on finding a new set of thought-provoking articles whenever you check in. 

A recent article Fixing the Fragmented University: A View from the Bridge is simply excellent. Any attempt to summarize it does it (and the reader) a tremendous disservice.  Suffice it to say that in a few pages he describes the forces of fragmentation in the modern research university, and approaches that leadership can take to rein in those forces just the right amount, providing some focus and flexibility to meet change without stifling the intellectual ferment that under girds the institution.  He emphasizes the necessity of building approaches that build on the legacy of the particular institution.  Much of what he says is drawn from the experience at Michigan, but it applies beautifully to a broad range of institutions.

Do Australia's public universities have a future?

I recently ran into a very interesting article by Glyn Davis, Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, entitled The rising phoenix of competition: what futures for Australia’s public universities? It appeared in the Autumn 2006 edition of the Griffith Review. Davis is a very thoughtful higher education leader who tries to peer into the future of higher education in Australia. A number of his other presentations can be found on the University of Melbourne "Speeches" site

In this article, Davis gives a very nice sketch of the history and present organization and status of higher education in Australia. He describes government policies that have tended to force all of Australian higher education (both public and private) into a Humboltian model of the research university.   He also explains how government funding policies have pushed Australian universities to aggressively search out international students. Then, backing off to take a more global (literally) view, he describes the internal and external forces that are making this model unsustainable.

His perspective is particularly worthwhile since Australia has been perhaps the most aggressive country in reaching out to international students both at home and abroad- what might be seen as the first stage of globalization of higher education.  Davis's concerns focus on the effects of increasing competition and educational innovation that globalization will bring to bear on the Australian model as globalization of higher education moves on to the next stage.

How People Learn

 “A remarkable feature of American colleges is the lack of attention that most faculties pay to the  growing body of research about how much students are learning and how they could be taught to learn more.”
                Derek Bok

The Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council put out a very useful book in 2000 called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, that describes the conclusions of a lot of that learning research in a very concise and readable way. As indicated in A D- in science education, this is information that many faculty need to have.

The report begins by emphasizing - as Bok might - that “the world is in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scientific work on the mind and brain, on the processes of thinking and learning, on the neural processes that occur during thought and learning, and on the development of competence. The revolution in the study of the mind that has occurred in the last three or four decades has important implications for education.” (p.3)