Changing Higher Education

Columbia goes global following a different track

Columbia University today announced the opening of several global research centers:

In a concerted effort to deepen its already extensive global perspective, the University is establishing Columbia Global Centers in Beijing, China and Amman, Jordan. They are the first of what the University plans as a network of centers around the world to promote and facilitate international collaborations, new research projects, academic programming and study abroad, enhancing Columbia’s historical commitment to global scholarship... ..
Columbia Global Centers will provide flexible regional hubs for a wide range of activities and resources intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the University and around the world. The goal is to establish a network of regional centers in international capitals to collaboratively address complex global challenges by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields.

This is a very exciting new approach to globalization for higher education.  I discussed a very similar approach in an earlier post Modularity in university higher education: Research, June 16, 2006. It builds on the understanding that “optimization” of research and teaching in a globalizing world involves putting together the most effective teams, using the best researchers around the world.  Regional centers provide an anchor that give the teams stability and breadth beyond that which can be achieved with typical multi-investigator projects.  A fascinating - and overdue - experiment!

Losing the world’s best and brightest: America’s new immigrant entrepreneurs, Part IV

The title of this new report from the Kaufman Foundation tells you a lot about its conclusions.  The authors, Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, Richard Freeman, and Alex Salkever used a Facebook based approach to interview over a thousand foreign national students at US institutions of higher education.  The report does not claim to be definitive in any way: it was not designed with random choice of interviewees, does not have a longitudinal component, etc.  However, it does make some very important points that will probably resonate with many of us who come into contact with international students on a regular basis.

The title also lets you know that this is part of a Kaufman Foundation series looking at immigrant entrepreneurship in the US.  As stated in the press release for this report:

Immigrants have contributed disproportionately in the most dynamic part of the U.S. economy—the high-tech sector—co-founding firms such as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo. In addition, immigrant inventors contributed to more than a quarter of U.S. global patent applications. Immigrant-founded U.S.-based companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006.

Many of these immigrant entrepreneurs arrived in this country as students, were trained at US institutions of higher education, and stayed here to follow their dreams.  Thus, the future plans and aspirations of  members of the current generation of international students are likely to have important implications for the health of the US economy in the future.  This report has good news and bad news on that front.

Failed experiments in offshore campuses

Kris Olds has a very nice post in GlobalHigherEd looking at recent closings of offshore campuses by US universities. He makes some quite pertinent points about the importance of learning -collectively- from these experiments.  Highly recommended

What now for globalization?

The future of capitalism is here, and it is not what any of us expected.

Lowell Bryan and Diana Farrell in  the McKinsey Quarterly

                                                                                        

I have written often in these posts about the effects of globalization and the rise of the market state on higher education.  Given the economic events of the past year, some recalibration of understanding of  these forces is obviously in order.  This post describes some of my immediate thoughts, starting with a re-visitation of the work of Philip Bobbitt that underpins the arguments made in several of my previous posts.

In his influential 2002 book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt described the global transition from a nation-state form of organization (in which the state seeks to provide for the welfare of its citizens) to that of a market state (in which the state seeks to maximize the opportunity of its citizens). This transition is being driven by large global forces that include technology, changing demographics, and the rise of global marketplaces for goods, knowledge, and currencies.  He suggested that there are three models that define the main characteristics of the new market state, and that states will eventually have to make decisions that will lead them primarily towards one or the other of these. The three models are (p 283)

(1) a mercantile state–i.e. one that endeavors to improve its relative positions vis-a-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) an entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absolute positions while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) an managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocks, etc.). 

Each of these different models has its own strengths and weaknesses and strategic implications. The Entrepreneurial Market-State is rather libertarian, looking for minimal state intervention in the economy and the private lives of citizens. “Privatized health care, housing, pensions, and education, as well as low taxes and low welfare benefits all characterize such states.” (p671). The US fits into this category.  The Mercantile Market –State “relies upon a strong central government to protect national industries, subsidize crucial research and development, and steer certain important enterprises toward success.”   “Opportunities available to the consumer…are sacrificed to the long-term opportunities of the society.”  In addition, “These societies are able to maintain social cohesion...in part because income disparities are suppressed, variations in take-home pay between manufacturing workers and service workers are rationalized, and elaborate social welfare subsidy systems, including public housing and access to education, are put in place…” (all p.671) Ensuring social stability might be said to be the goal of the Mercantile Market-State.  Many Asian economies fall into this category. Finally, there is the Managerial Market-State. This form is characterized by “free and open markets within a regional trading framework, a government that provides a social safety neat and manages a stringent monetary policy, and a socially cohesive society.”(p.672) “Strong national unions negotiate contracts across whole sectors of the economy rather than by individual company or factory.” Assuring social equality is one of the major goals of this form. Much of Europe falls into this category.  Bobbitt predicts strong competition (or perhaps conflict) between these different forms of market state as each seeks to become the constitutional archetype of the market-state.

Transatlantic joint and double degree programs

A fascinating report Joint and Double Degree Programs in the Transatlantic Context has just been published by the Institute of International Education and the Freie Universitat Berlin .  It describes the results of a survey of American and European universities looking at the rapidly increasing phenomenon of transatlantic joint and double degree programs. The survey was not meant to be representative of activity in an absolute sense (only 180 institutions participated), but rather to show trends and developments.
The report notes:

One of the more prominent recent developments involves the emergence of transatlantic degree programs, such as dual diplomas, joint degrees, consortia and other forms of curriculum cooperation arrangements. Among European countries the introduction of joint and double degree programs has long been a vital part of internationalization strategies in higher education, helping to create stronger links and flourishing institutional partnerships,as well as preparing students for a global workplace. In the North American context, such programs have been until recently a less common feature of internationalization strategies for higher education institutions. However, the interest in curriculum cooperation is gaining momentum not only in the U.S. but in most countries around the world. In an increasingly global and competitive higher education market, collaborative programs, or “codesharing” as airlines would call it, can offer a set of advantages and are an important asset in the struggle
for attracting the best and the brightest.

The report also describes another troublesome aspect of American higher education that such programs may help correct:

Another challenge to transatlantic academic exchange is the increasing predominance of short-term study abroad programs in the U.S. While Europe still remains the leading destination for U.S. students who study abroad, the length of study abroad sojourns has declined dramatically in the past decade. Currently, only 6% of all U.S. students who study abroad, spend a full academic year in the host country, according to IIE’s Open Doors Report. The majority of study abroad programs are short-term programs of eight weeks or less, which may have only limited impact on the development of intercultural skills and foreign language immersion. Medium-term and long-term study abroad sojourns, especially if conducted in a structured way in cooperation with local partner institutions and including exposure to local student body and faculty, hold far greater opportunities in this respect.

Among the many  findings are that double degrees are much more common than joint degrees, but that European institutions offer about twice as many joint degrees as do American institutions.  The US institutions focus on undergraduate joint and double degrees, the European institutions on graduate programs.  The most common programs are in business and engineering.   The most common partners for European institutions are US institutions and other European Universities, but there are a significant number of partnerships with Latin American and Asian institutions as well. For the US institutions, European partnerships are the most common, and Asian partnerships play a somewhat more important role than is the case with European universities. 

At several points, the report indicates the importance of the Bologna process (see The Bologna process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education , Sept 12, 2008) in stimulating such programs in Europe. One very interesting sentence caught my eye:

Built on consecutive, intertwined modules, European BA programs are beginning to find new ways of integrating study abroad components into the curriculum.

Another competitive aspect of Bologna that we in the US should carefully note!

Laureate keeps on building a global brand

Doug Becker, the CEO and Chairman of Laureate, has done a masterful job of inventing a truly global university.  He and his excellent team have built a very visible, positive global brand for Laureate, one that depends on more than their many campuses spread around the world.  He has understood the importance to his brand of working with international public agencies such as the World Bank, and having a visible presence at international meetings on higher education.  

This photo captures perfectly one of Becker's more recent steps in global brand building.  At the December 3, 2008 the Clinton Global Initiative Asia Meeting, Becker announced an international scholarship initiative for deserving teachers around the world to enable them to get an advanced degree in  education, business, or information technology. Laureate will award 1,000 scholarships in this program, which is named in honor of Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education during the Clinton Administration.  The scholarships will be to attend institutions in the Laureate International Universities network.  Because the network has universities in 20 countries, this program likely will both be widely visible internationally, and have local impact in areas where the awardees teach. Of course, because the network is so large and well developed, the marginal cost to Laureate of these scholarships will be small. Other competitors -all smaller- would have difficulty in getting such a beneficial impact/cost from a similar brand-building effort.  Another example showing that size matters, and Becker and his team are working hard to capture first-mover advantage in the field of global higher education .

New global higher education activities by the Apollo and Carlyle Groups

 

A little over a year ago, I noted that the Apollo Group (parent of the University of Phoenix) was partnering with the global investment firm Carlyle Group to form a joint education venture called Apollo Global.  At the time of the post, it was not at all clear what the strategy of Apollo Global would follow, although some analysts had suggested that it might be similar to that of Laureate.  So it clearly is time for an update on Apollo Global, and in the process, on the educational ventures of the Carlyle Group

On Feb 28, 2008, Apollo announced that Apollo Global had made its first move by agreeing to purchase a university in Chile:

Universidad de Artes, Ciencias y Comunicacion ("UNIACC"), an accredited, private arts and communications university in Chile, as well as its related entities. This includes the Instituto Superior de Artes y Ciencias de la Comunicacion, S.A. ("IACC"), the first online autonomous professional institute in the country which was founded in 1981.UNIACC, founded in 1989 and based in Santiago, Chile, has over 3,000 students and three campuses.....
UNIACC is one of the leading arts and communications universities in Latin America and is renowned for its high-profile faculty and state-of-the-art technology. Accredited by the Chilean Council of Higher Education, UNIACC offers 18 bachelor's and two master's programs. In 2004, UNIACC became the first university in Chile to teach a fully online undergraduate program, and today offers six fully online and one blended program, mainly serving the needs of working adults.

Earlier, in September 2005, The Carlyle Group bought a majority participation in a private university in Mexico, Universidad Latinoamericana, S.C. (ULA).  The Carlyle website indicates that in November 2006, it purchased the remainder of ULA. Finally, in August, 2008, Carlyle moved some of its ULA holdings "from one pocket to the other", when it sold 65% of ULA to Apollo Global (which it owns in part), retaining a 35% holding directly.  This then gave Apollo Global a majority stake in a Mexican university, ULA:

Founded in 1975, ULA is renowned for its dentistry, medicine and communications programs accredited by the Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Publica, SEP) in Mexico. ULA carries authorization from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) for its high school and undergraduate psychology and law programs. With four campuses throughout Mexico, including two in Mexico City, one in Tlalnepantla de Baz, and a fourth in the city of Cuernavaca, ULA offers 27 degree programs and has more than 4,000 students.

Thus over the past year,  Apollo Global has established a presence in both Chile and Mexico, and has done so following Laureate’s approach of purchasing existing institutions.  Of course, Laureate already has a very large presence in both Chile and Mexico - and around the world.  It will be interesting to see what Apollo Global does in the future to differentiate its strategy from that of Laureate - and to provide more substantive competition to Laureate globally.  Will Apollo Global make some use of the enormously successful model developed by its sibling the University of Phoenix as it moves forward?

Meanwhile, The Carlyle Group has made a new investment in global higher education. On November 27, 2008, it  announced a $50M (US) investment in Hao Yue Education Group, a prominent Chinese provider of private higher-education.:

Hao Yue was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zhou Jiting and his team. Since then, its flagship school has grown to more than 30,000 students with two campuses in Beijing and more than 200 hectares of campus area. It is now one of China’s largest private universities based on student enrollment, campus area and registered capital. There are more than 1,500 full time teachers among the nearly 30 secondary colleges and schools under the school, offering more than 130 majors....
The business model of Hao Yue’s university puts career training and development at the core of its service proposition, offering a career-oriented curriculum that equips its students with strong practical skills and puts them in touch with a wide employer network. It emphasizes internships for students to gain proper pre-employment training. During the last few years, Hao Yue’s university graduates have enjoyed a high employment rate of approximately 80%.

The announcement acknowledges the “global market turmoil”, but describes China’s education sector as “resilient”. It is nice to know that a group with money is still bullish on higher education!

The US is once again attracting large numbers of international students!! Right?

The Institute of International Education (IIE) recently released  its annual Open Doors report on the number of international students in the US.  The press release for the report is headlined

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS ON U.S. CAMPUSES AT ALL-TIME HIGH

Total foreign student numbers up 7%; New enrollments up 10%

That sound like good news! We are finally coming back from the post 9/11 drop off in international students. US higher education has once again regained its allure!

Or has it?

Included in these numbers are a couple of interesting categories.   The first is enrollment in  “non-degree programs”, primarily intensive English.  The second is “Optional Practical Training” (OPT). This enables undergraduate and graduate students with an F-1 student visa to work for periods up to one year in temporary employment directly related to their major fields of study.  The one-year period has recently been extended for students in the STEM areas, and provisions have been loosened for cases in which an employer has requested a H-1B visa for the student. 

When we look at the numbers, we find that the total number of international undergraduates is up this year by a relatively modest 4.6%, the total number of international graduates, by similarly modest 4.8%.  The real growth is in the non-degree students, 20.1%, and OPT, a whopping 36.3%.  We should, of course, be delighted for a variety of reasons to see these latter two categories grow.  However, they do not relate to the comparative attractiveness of our core higher education offerings.  And growth in OPT, because the rules are rapidly changing, is difficult to evaluate. 

Similarly, if we look at the vaunted new enrollment growth  (where OPT is not considered) number of 10%, we find a similar breakdown.  That is,  UG first year international undergrads are up 7.0%, grads, 7.9%, and non-degree students, 27.7%.

However, the real question is, “how are we doing compared to everyone else?”  I don’t find any up-to-date global data to compare to the US IIE results for 2008.  The most recent OECD report, Education at a Glance 2008, contains data on transnational education only up through 2006.  That report shows that for the period 2000-2006, the number of students enrolled in higher education outside of their country of origin grew on the average at 7.5% per year (Table C3.6).  During that period, the US share of all transnational students fell from 25.1% to 20% (Table C3.7). 

The  foreign student numbers reported in Open Doors that should be compared to the OECD data (UG, G, and non-degree) show a growth of only 4.8%. However, if growth in transnational students has continued at the 7.5% rate, then the IIE numbers would suggest that our share of the transnational market has continued to decline. 

So the good news would seem to be that we are getting more international students than we did a few years ago - and the bad news would seem to be that the increases are probably not keeping up with global growth in transnational students.

An Asian "Bologna Process" moves forward

The ten  countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have begun to discuss  the creation of an Bologna -type process in their region.   The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) organized a meeting in Thailand in early November, 2008, to begin to consider the challenges and opportunities that could be provided by a harmonization of higher education in Southeast Asia. 

Prof. Dr. Supachai Yavaprabhas, the Director of SEAMEO RIHED, the organization’s Center for Higher Education and Development, had spoken earlier at a UNESCO regional conference about harmonization in the ASEAN region.  In his speech, he outlined the history of higher education cooperation in the region, and described some of the aspirations behind this cooperation.  They are quite parallel to those that can be found in the  Bologna accords: to promote higher education quality, and to build ASEAN identity through free movement of scholars around the region.  In 2007, the leadership of the region agreed that the focus should be on five areas:

a) ASEAN Quality Framework and Curriculum Development;
b) Student Mobility;
c) Leadership;
d) E-learning and Mobile learning; and
e) ASEAN Research Clusters

Dr Yavaprabhas also discussed the very uneven levels of quality assurance mechanisms currently in place in the various ASEAN nations.

The November meeting was based on preliminary reports on prospects for harmonization prepared by representatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The meeting itself has been described in the Australian and University World News.

Clearly, creating the desired “higher education common space” in the ASEAN region will be very difficult.  The countries vary considerably in the level and organization of their systems of higher education, and most are developing nations with relatively limited resources.  Nevertheless, the potential payoff could be enormous, and would greatly increase the ability of the region to compete effectively in the knowledge-based world of globalization . 

ASEAN has set 2015 as the target year for the creation of this higher education common space.  Just as Bologna has found that its original targets were too optimistic, ASEAN will certainly find that this target cannot be realistically attained.  However, there will be major benefits to the region from every successful step taken along the path to a functioning regional higher education common space.

Are we approaching a tipping point in the globalization of higher education?

The unsettling financial events of the past few weeks have undoubtedly pushed the cost/price model of American higher education much closer to the breaking point.  In an earlier post, I argued that any significant limitations on price increases could cause fundamental problems for our basic business model.  We now are in a much more complex situation than I discussed in the earlier posts. The state of the economy certainly will lead to greater pressure from parents and government to halt increases in the real price of higher education, so we can expect more intrusive legislative actions, and much stronger push-back from parents.  Loans to parents and students, which have provided the undergirding support of our large price increases, will not be so easy to get in the future for a multitude of reasons including large drops in home values.   In addition, we face a situation in which philanthropy will be quite uncertain for some period, and endowments and their returns have been greatly battered.   For public institutions, there is the reality that states are seeing greatly reduced tax returns, and furious budget cutting is evident everywhere.   And on the cost side, the cost of borrowing (when it can be obtained) will certainly go up significantly. This will impact higher education directly in many ways, as in  our facilities programs where we usually use considerable long term debt.  In addition, many  higher education institutions have significant short term debt that is used to pay bills in between the huge inflows of income that occur at the beginning of each semester (trimester or quarter).

In my view, all of this pushes American higher education much closer to a globalization tipping-point, similar to the one  that occurred in Great Britain and Australia a decade ago.  In both cases, governments told public higher ed institutions that state funding would not be sufficient in the future to maintain their growth and quality, and that other sources of funding would have to be found - without passing the burden to domestic students.  The solution was to bring international students in at high tuition, and to open campuses and programs around the world.

The Bologna Process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education

Modularization is critical to the success of industrial globalization because it enables global maximization of the production process by utilizing “best” producers of different modules. There are certainly components of cross -border higher education that can be described as modular (see Why has globalization had such a small effect on higher education - and when will that change? Dec 3, 2007 and Modularity in university higher education: Education, Aug.7, 2006).  Nevertheless, the reality is that higher education at this time is not really thought of in modular terms, and that limits the impact of globalization in higher education.   All of this may be about to change, however, because the Bologna Process is all about finding ways to define educational modules and create quality control mechanisms for those modules.  It provides a fascinating look at ways in which educational modules are different from, and similar to, the modules that have enabled globalization in industry, and suggests that educational modularization ultimately may  result in a remarkable shift of power from the institutions to the students. If it succeeds, the Bologna Process may show the way to rapid increases in globalization of higher education.

Globalization and inequality - and education

A recent International Monetary Fund working paper entitled “Rising Income Inequality: Technology, or Trade and Financial Globalization?” provides a fascinating look at the almost universal phenomenon of rising income inequality.  The abstract outlines the central conclusions of the paper:

We examine the relationship between trade and financial globalization and the rise in
inequality in most countries in recent decades. We find technological progress as having a
greater impact than globalization on inequality. The limited overall impact of globalization
reflects two offsetting tendencies: whereas trade globalization is associated with a reduction in inequality, financial globalization—and foreign direct investment in particular—is associated with an increase. A key finding is that both globalization and technological changes increase the returns on human capital, underscoring the importance of education and training in both developed and developing countries in addressing rising inequality.

The authors of this paper, Florence Jaumotte, Subir Lall, and Chris Papageorgio, do a remarkable job of looking at the roles of the interacting forces of technology, trade globalization, and financial globalization in producing this inequality.  Growth of inequality, they show, is widespread around the world, but with significant variations:

...inequality has risen in all but the low-income country aggregates over the past two decades, although there are significant regional and country differences. In addition, while inequality has risen in developing Asia, emerging Europe, Latin America, the Newly Industrialized Economics, and the advanced economies over the past two decades, it has declined in some sub-Sahara African countries. ....among the largest advanced economies, inequality appears to have declined only in France, whereas among the major emerging market countries ..., trends are more diverse, with sharply rising inequality in China, little change in India, and falling inequality in Brazil.

Laureate Education moves into the United States - a new direction?

 This week, the for-profit  leader in global higher education Laureate Education announced that it “has acquired NewSchool of Architecture and Design, based in San Diego, California, and has finalized its acquisition of Kendall College, based in Chicago, Illinois.”   Up to now, Laureate’s focus has been entirely on offshore institutions, and it has a physical presence in 18 countries - but not the US.  Do these new US acquisitions mark a shift in Laureate strategy?

I think the answer to this question is - no. I believe these acquisitions simply reflect another step in the roll-out of the existing strategy.  In a previous post, Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Laureate, I noted that Laureate had begun to seek US. accreditation for several of its off-shore institutions.  In the press release announcing the accreditation of Laureate’s Glion Institute of Higher Education and Les Roches Hotel Management School (both Swiss)  by The New England Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, Laureate CEO Doug Becker noted that such “accreditation represents one of the highest standards for the assessment of universities”.  Thus Laureate is using internationally recognized US accreditation to support its strategy of branding itself as a high quality, medium cost higher education provider.  I think they strengthened this part of their strategy by adding  to their portfolio two existing, accredited institutions in the US.  Of course, the two institutions also need to fit into the existing network of universities in a way consistent with what we have seen of Laureate strategy, and we can hypothesize how these new purchases might be viewed in this context.

One wonders why they protest so much??

In Another ranking of higher education - with a radical twist, I reported that OECD was thinking of doing international comparisons of national outcome measures for higher education.  I suggested that this focus on outcomes rather than inputs might lead to an interesting and enlightening set of information. 

It is not surprising that the American Council on Education is working to derail this effort since that organization has been very active in efforts to stop outcomes testing in the US.  Once again, David Ward (Pres. of ACE) argues that there are too many variables - funding methods, mission, etc. Further, he raises the possibility that the national rankings will be used to rank individual institutions, and that funding agencies might misuse this data.   Clearly, ACE is simply continuing to trot out its usual “we are too complicated to be held accountable” arguments, in this case bolstered by a threat of yet another ranking system for institutions of higher education. 

It is not obvious that the OECD effort would produce data that could be used to create another ranking system, given the way that previous OECD data has been reported.  However, since there are a  number of such ranking systems already in existence that focus on input measures, the fact that Ward focuses his displeasure on this particular possibility would seem to indicate that he thinks rankings based on outputs are even more misleading than rankings based on inputs. I would have argued the opposite. 

There are some obvious weaknesses in the system that OECD has outlined.  However, I think American higher education would be greatly strengthened if its leaders stopped focusing on preventing accountability measures, and worked instead to make sure the right measures exist and are adopted. 

Update on KAUST

The King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is moving along on its development plans (see King Abdulla University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century? June 5, 2007).  In January, KAUST got off to an excellent start with the appointment of Shih Choon Fong as its first President.  Dr Shih is currently the very highly regarded President of the National University of Singapore, and will assume the presidency of KAUST next December.

KAUST is not waiting for its president to arrive, however, before implementing its plans to build by creating partnerships with the leading educational institutions in the world.  Although some of the agreements took some time to actually finalize, previously announced partnerships and dates are:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutite (June 15, 2007)
Institute Francais de Petrole ( June 22, 2007)
National University of Singapore (June 27, 2007)
IIT Bombay (July 16, 2007)
American University in Cairo (September 5, 2007)
Technische Universitat Munchen (January 24, 2008).
Each of these agreements describes partnerships in specific areas of research and education, with financial arrangements that vary to meet the circumstances.

In the last two days, three very significant new partnership arrangement with American universities have been announced.  On March 4, agreements with the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford University were announced, and on March 5, an agreement with the University of Texas at Austin was announced.  It is reported that Stanford and UCB will each receive almost $30M over 5 years as part of this partnership.  Of that, $10 will be for participating departments, $10M will be for joint research at the institutions involving new KAUST faculty, $5M will be for joint research at KAUST, and $3M-$4M will be for administrative costs.  Stanford and UCB will each have responsibilities in identifying and helping to recruit faculty for KAUST, and in hosting KAUST faculty until the KAUST campus opens.  The conditions at UT are more or less the same.

All in all, a very impressive list of partner institutions.  The quality and the international visibility of each of them helps to assure that KAUST will indeed begin to develop following international norms for access and freedom of inquiry.

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?)

Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Laureate

In my most recent post, I looked at some interesting relationships between Kaplan and several traditional non-profit institutions of higher education.  In this post, I want to look at some of the relationships that Laureate is developing as it continues to evolve its globalization strategy.

Laureate Education, like Kaplan, has a branch accredited by the North Central Association - Walden University.  Walden (which incorporated the old National Technological University) is an exclusively on-line provider and so can be accessed around the world.  Walden is just one component of Laureate’s online stable which also includes Laureate online education, BV, OnlineLearning.net, and Canter.  However, the main thrust of Laureate’s strategy is bricks and mortar in the global arena.  It  has created its global network of institutions of higher education primarily by buying existing accredited private colleges and universities.  This network currently has nearly 250,000 students world-wide.  Laureate has begun to seek US accreditation for several of its offshore schools, and, for example, its Glion Institute of Higher Education and Les Roches Swiss Hotel Association of Hotel Management have both been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

Recently, Laureate has begun to expand into regions that either do not permit for-profit higher education, or that require local ownership.  This has led the company to create other types of arrangements than they have used in the past. One example is the November 2006 arrangement with Istanbul Bilgi University, a prominent non-profit Turkish university.  Turkey does not allow for-profit higher education, so a typical purchase agreement was not possible. In this case, Laureate, in partnership with parties in Turkey,  has provided 50% of the funding for a company that will provide technology, financial management, student and human resource services to Bilgi.  As part of this arrangement, Bilgi joins the Laureate University Network, which opens up opportunities for Bilgi students for study abroad and exchange programs at campuses of other members of the Network.  Additional goals of this partnership are reported to be expansion of Bilgi in Turkey, and creation of new campuses in other countries of the Middle East and Russia.  Thus, Laureate and Bilgi have found a cooperative arrangement that plays to the strengths or special advantages of each.  As a consequence, Laureate will gain a platform for entry into the Middle East, and  Bilgi will benefit from Laureate’s expertise in management and gain access to capital markets that will enable it to expand aggressively. One has to imagine that Laureate's experience in entering new markets will play a major role in Bilgi's expansion plans.  Could well be a win-win situation.

Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Kaplan

Conventional wisdom might suggest that for-profit and non-profit higher education institutions have nothing in common, and should stay clear of each other.  However,  there are some quite interesting areas where the two are beginning to work together, leveraging on each other’s strengths.  In fact, the arrangements look suspiciously like outsourcing of modules in the education chain.  Although there are many for-profits collaborating with the non-profits, I will focus on two of the largest for-profit higher education corporations, Kaplan and Laureate.   This post will look at Kaplan, and a subsequent post will consider a very different set of partnerships beginning to be developed by Laureate. 

For-profit Kaplan has its own North-Central-accredited undergraduate and graduate programs in both campus and online modes.  However, in addition, it runs numerous programs in partnership with traditional non-profit institutions of higher education.   One group of these programs is designed for international students whose preparation would not normally gain them admission into the partner institutions, or who feel that they need a transition period of cultural acclimation before entering the partner institutions.  Partnerships of this type are primarily with United Kingdom institutions: Nottingham Trent International College, Sheffield International College, Liverpool International College and Glasgow International College.  Each of these programs is housed on the campus of the partner institution. In each case, Kaplan provides international students with a one-year (two-year in some cases) course that focuses on building key academic skills and appropriate background work, as well as intensive English language instruction as needed.   Upon graduation from this partnership program, the student is guaranteed entry into the regular undergraduate or graduate programs of the partner institution.  For those going into regular undergraduate programs, entry is at either the first- or second-year level, depending on the specifics of the program.

Why has globalization had such a small effect on higher education - and when will that change?

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.   

But why has higher education  responded so slowly to the opportunities and challenges of globalization?  I argue that the major reason has been the place-based nature of our history, and consequently, of our missions. There are also constraints in the way of change, which include the reality that at present, US higher education has been dominant in the competition for international students and faculty; that the constituencies that support higher education are not open to a greatly changed role; and that government in the US has not addressed the question of what it expects of higher education in a rapidly globalizing world.

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!

The breakdown of the price-productivity-cost model of private research universities

I have learned a lot recently  participating in a project on Global Higher Education led by Paul Jansen and Debby Bielak of McKinsey &Co.  The project is sponsored by the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. Paul and Debby have collected a group of university CFO’s, a college president, and an old provost (me) together to apply a McKinsey sector-wide analysis to higher education. It is fascinating to see what such an analysis tells us about our world.

The team recently made a presentation entitled Higher Education Trends and Risks: Implications for Leading Institutions and Sector Performance  at the annual Aspen Symposium of the Forum.  My assignment was to talk about trends and risks for private research universities - in 15 minutes.  I approached this impossible task by first apologizing to the audience for the egregious simplifications that I would have to make in order to describe the situation in 15 minutes, and then introduced my simple one-parameter model to describe the problems facing the research university.  Since this model met with some approval at the Symposium, I thought it might be worth repeating here.

I began by describing what I called our Mission Box. Excellence - as defined by us in a very self-referential way - has become the visible driver of our mission.  Our mission, in a very general way, focuses on traditional undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, and research.  Focusing on excellence means that if it is worth doing (i.e. one of our mission foci), it is worth doing better.  Doing it better costs more money, so at some point the customer can’t, or won’t pay for it, so we lose money.  As a consequence, over time, losing money has become our very visible surrogate for excellence (my one parameter model). (Clayton Christensen, who also spoke at the symposium, has pointed out the often catastrophic outcomes of making your product better than the customer wants or needs. See also Disruptive Technologies:when great universities fail? March 3, 2006)

Inventing the global university: the competition among the for-profits increases

Up until now, Laureate Education has been pretty much the only institution working to build a truly global university.  Most recently, Laureate was taken private by a group of heavy hitters (including the endowment funds of Stanford and Harvard) so that it could take an even more aggressive approach to creating the first really global higher education entity (see Doug Becker moves to China, July 26, 2007).   However, Apollo Group, which previously has had a relatively  unsuccessful venture into globalization, has now taken on a substantial partner itself with the goal of stepping up the competition with Laureate. 

Apollo has partnered  with the Carlyle Group to form a $1B joint venture called Apollo Global to invest in education services outside the US.  Details are scarce at the moment, but it appears likely that the focus of this new enterprise will be on China, India, and Latin America.  Brooke B. Coburn, Managing Director and Co-head of Carlyle Venture Partners III, L.P., said in a Carlyle press release, “Global demand for higher education is strong.  Apollo Group’s operational expertise coupled with Carlyle’s global network make this a powerful partnership.” Some financial analysts are suggesting that the approach taken by this new partnership will be similar to that taken by Laureate - buying existing schools in the target regions.   It will be very interesting to learn more about the strategy of this new player - and to watch the response of Laureate.

Is “excellence” a useful mission for higher education?

I have commented on the essential “nation-state” identity of universities, and how globalization-driven changes in the nature of government are leaving universities without a clear sense of future mission (see e.g.A nation state institution in a market state world, 3/28/06).  Michael A. Peters, in Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education, makes some excellent points about the “default” university  mission that has evolved.

He begins (p.166) by quoting B. Readings (The University in Ruins) regarding some of the consequences of the break-down of the link between the university and the nation state:

The economics of globalization mean that the university is no longer called upon to train citizen subjects, while the politics of the end of the cold war mean that the university is no longer called upon to uphold national prestige by producing and legitimating national culture.

Peters goes on to write:
Readings suggests that excellence has become the last unifying principle of the modern university.  When Ministry policy analysts or university administrators talked about excellence, unwittingly they bracket the question of values in favor of measurement and substitute accounting solutions for questions of accountability. As an integrating principle excellence has the advantage of being meaningless: it is non-referential.

The evolving globalization of higher education

We are becoming accustomed to daily news reports that one US institution of higher education or another is starting a campus or a program somewhere abroad.  We also see a number of other countries (e.g. Australia, England) that have numerous institutions of higher education that are very active in setting up shop in foreign countries, primarily in Asia or Africa.   However,  The Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper, recently published an article reminding one that globalization does not work in just one direction.

Seoul National University (SNU) announced on Thursday that it has plans to build a branch learning center in Los Angeles or San Francisco, in the western United States, where there are large numbers of Koreans. The facility will be a place where overseas Koreans and students can take Korean studies courses or where SNU students can go and work as interns or to take classes from professors in the region.

Doug Becker moves to China

I have long believed that real innovation in higher education will not come in the US, but from some area such as China or India where there are enormous higher education needs, and greatly constrained resources compared to those needs.  It is there that the very expensive US model of higher education will run prove most ineffective.  Apparently Doug Becker, Chairman and CEO of Laureate Education, is of the same opinion. He has just announced that he and his family are moving from Baltimore ( the home of Laureate) to Hong Kong so that he can establish a new Asia headquarters there.  Doug and his team have been incredibly innovative in the way they have built Laureate thus far, and I am sure they intend to bring that innovative spirit to Asia with them.   

In his announcement of his move to Laureate employees, Doug also noted that the investors behind the recent private equity buyout of Laureate included Paul Allen, George Soros, and the endowment of Harvard University (see also Can the stock market understand for-profit higher education? Feb.23, 2007).  Harvard must be hedging its bets on the future of higher education!

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.

Societal Expectations

In a recent post (Who are our customers for education:II Society as customer. April 22, 2007) I discussed possible societal expectations for higher education in an increasingly globalized world.  In this, I drew some parallels with societal expectations for American corporations as they expand globally.   Interestingly, the most recent McKinsey Quarterly (unfortunately subscription only) has an extended look at societal expectations regarding corporations.  Insofar as these expectations may be pertinent in understanding the societal expectations for universities as they expand, it is useful to review some aspects of what they found.

Interestingly, globally, 84% of executives of large corporations and 89% of consumers believe that corporate obligations to shareholders must be balanced by contributions to the broader public good. However, when executives grade themselves in their performance on this scale, only 68% of them say that corporations make a  “generally”or “somewhat” positive contribution to the public good.  The consumer’s view of the success rate of corporations is much less positive: 48% believe that corporation are making a “somewhat” or “generally” positive contribution to the public good.  However, although the executives grade themselves on this measure with some consistency around the world, the consumer’s viewpoint varies radically according to geographic location. Only 35%-40% of consumers in Europe, Japan, and the US say that large business makes a generally or somewhat positive contribution to social issues, while consumers in China (76%) and India (78%) view large corporations as positive on these measures.

University of New South Wales exits Singapore

On April 24, 2004, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Singapore Economic Development Board announced that UNSW would be setting up “the first foreign private university in Singapore”. The new entity was to be something quite unusual:
Unlike other foreign universities which set up franchises or joint-campus operations overseas, UNSW Singapore will be wholly-owned, independently governed and run by UNSW. It will be a research and teaching campus with a strong science and technology focus.
The goal was to have 15,000 students in the steady state, 70% of whom would be international students.  This initiative was to be a key element of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse Effort.  In other words, this was an important experiment in the globalization of higher education.

This last week, UNSW announced  to its students that it was closing down its Singapore campus before it really began.

The only explanation that has been presented so far is that of UNSW, which simply said that initial enrollment did not meet expectations. Clearly this cannot be the only reason, given the significant investment both parties must have made by this point (reports in the media regarding the investments are so wildly different that they don't bear repeating).  Thus, one should not leap to conclusions yet about what this says about the globalization of higher education.  However, it does make one remember the difficulties that my old institution, Johns Hopkins, had with their Center in Singapore.  It was closed down just about a year ago because, according to the Singapore government, it had not met its research and educational goals. 

Eric Beerkens has a very nice summary of background and some of the questions raised by this closing in a recent post on his blog  Clearly, this situation will need to be looked at more closely as more information comes out so that we can draw some useful lessons.