To operate in this global market, institutions – and especially the lesser-known ones – now frequently turn to agents and recruiters in order to attract prospective students. Many point to the risks of using these third party agents and plead for more regulation or even abolishment.

Abolish or regulate?

In Inside Higher Ed, Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education, sheds light on this issue. His viewpoint is clear and unambiguous: “Agents and recruiters are impairing academic standards and integrity – and it’s time for colleges and universities to stop using them.” >> Read the rest of my post at the Nuffic Blog >>

Anticipating the implementation of the new migration system, the government will at the latest in the first half of 2009 introduce a regulation for highly skilled immigrants. On the basis of the regulation, foreigners can stay in the country for a maximum of one year to find a job as a ‘knowledge migrant’ or to start an innovative company.

The objective of the regulation connects well to the ambition of the innovation platform to attract 1000 extra knowledge migrants. It is also in line with the advice on knowledge migrants of the Commission on Labour Participation in its report ‘towards a future that works‘.

The target group consists of foreigners that are relatively young and received their Bachelor, Master or PhD degree not longer than three years ago. Migrants are eligible if they received their degree from a university that is in the top 150 of two international league tables of universities. Because of the overlap, the lists consists of 189 universities…

And guess what the two league tables are. Yes, the Shanghai ranking and the Times Higher Education Ranking. Now…this will mean that firms like this have influence on who is eligible to come and work in the Netherlands. Something is not right here…

Howard Rollins, the former director of international programs at Georgia Tech, which has degree programs in France, Singapore, Italy, South Africa and China, and plans for India:

“Where universities are heading now is toward becoming global universities. We’ll have more and more universities competing internationally for resources, faculty and the best students.”

Susan Jeffords, vice provost for global affairs of the University of Washington, about the increase in demand for higher education from overseas students:

“It’s almost like spam”

Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania:

“I still think the downside is lower than the upside is high. The risk is that we couldn’t deliver the same quality education that we do here, and that it would mean diluting our faculty strength at home.”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who has criticized the rush overseas:

“A lot of these educators are trying to present themselves as benevolent and altruistic, when in reality, their programs are aimed at making money.

I’m someone who believes that Americans should watch out for Americans first. It’s one thing for universities here to send professors overseas and do exchange programs, which do make sense, but it’s another thing to have us running educational programs overseas.”

David J. Skorton, the president of Cornell, explaining that the global drive benefits the United States:

“Higher education is the most important diplomatic asset we have. I believe these programs can actually reduce friction between countries and cultures.”

Edward Guiliano, President of the New York Institute of Technology, with programs in Bahrain, Jordan, Abu Dhabi, Canada, Brazil and China:

“We’re leveraging what we’ve got, which is the New York in our first name and the Technology in our last name. I believe that in the 21st century, there will be a new class of truly global universities. There isn’t one yet, but we’re as close as anybody.”

Clearly, institutional globalisation provides many opportunities, not just for making extra bucks, but also for creating academic, cultural and political ties for the future and for meeting the demand in countries that cannot meet the rising demand themselves. At the same time, recent history has shown that the commercial viability of such ventures are at least doubtful…

UPDATE: it appears to be a hot item in the US. The NY Times had a follow up article on the issue and Inside HigherEd has an article on US branch campuses in China.

What did the internets bring me today? A lot of globalisation…

• The World and globalisation - Globalisation is globalising. A site by Axel Dreher of the ETH Zurich containing lots of data on economic, social and political globalisation: the KOF index of globalisation.

• Education & globalisation – There are many many definitions of globalisation and this is the one taught in French textbooks: "globalisation implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a real cultural danger". Stefan Theil in Foreign Policy on bias and indoctrination in German and French economics textbooks.
• Blog post on globalisation - The brave men and women of the Australian Customs Service protect Australia from the dangers of globalisation. Mercurius over at Larvatus Prodeo praises the dedication of these fine officers and the hardships they have to endure.

I mentioned before that it has been difficult to find out the real reasons for the UNSW Asia closure in Singapore in May this year. The University of New South Wales has not exactly followed a transparent strategy in this issue (for my interpretation of the events, look at this post).

A similar level of secrecy seems to be applied to the further handling of the case. This week the Singapore Straits Times reported that the University of New South Wales has agreed to repay some 25 million Australian dollars to Singapore.

The Singapore Economic Development Board said that UNSW has signed a ‘settlement agreement in respect of all outstanding loans and grants payable to the Singapore Government’. Both parties (EDB and UNSW) however declined to comment since they ‘are bound by the terms of agreement which are confidential’.

This makes the issue that I put forward earlier even more pressing. How do we deal with the private ventures of public institutions? Shouldn’t a public university be held publicly accountable for its risky private operations overseas? Clearly, transparency and public accountability are not high on the priority list in the aftermath of the UNSW Asia debacle…

What defines a global ‘superpower’? In the past, it was the size of national armies or possession of nuclear weapons. But now there is a more important (and peaceful) benchmark: the size and prestige of university systems. And, while the US is still the global higher education ‘superpower’, China will soon be knocking it off top spot if current trends continue.

…a dramatic insight into just how rapidly China is moving in the higher education race… anything anyone in the West can easily imagine… a wake-up call to universities and governments around the world…The UK is in danger of slipping back…

So states a report of BBC news, with the alarming title China’s bid for world domination. A bit over the top if you ask me. The rise of India and China as doom scenarios for the future competitiveness of developed nations: an image frequently used by current university leaders to appeal to their national governments and ask for additional funding. And by the media to spice up a story.

That being said… the BBC report is based on presentations of a recent conference of the Worldwide Universities Network, a partnership of 17 research-led universities from Europe, North America, China and Australia. In my view, it’s one of the most active networks of its kind, with many activities in the field of research cooperation, research mobility, e-learning and the organisation of virtual seminars and many other events.

Also in the field of higher education there has been quite some cooperation. There have been initiatives like ‘Constructing Knowledge Spaces’, concerned with researching and theorising the globalisation of education, the ‘Ideas & Universities‘ project and the ‘Network Horizons Virtual Seminar Series‘ of 2006. Cooperation between Wisconsin and Bristol has even led to a new addition to the higher education blogosphere.

And recently, in London, there were meetings for the project ‘Realizing the Global University‘, which is aiming to:

… provoke and inform a discussion that will provide institutional leaders, policy makers and others across the higher education sector with the opportunity to develop tools, establish best practice and benchmarking standards, and create a structured and sustained dialogue to support effective action.

The meetings consisted of a ‘critical perspectives’ workshop at the 14th of November and a conference on the following day. At the conference most of the presentations came from Vice Chancellors and other university leaders, while the workshop presentations were mainly from researchers in the field. The most interesting papers were obviously presented at the workshop.

I wasn’t at the workshop myself but had a quick look at the papers. They discuss a wide range of issues related to the internationalisation of universities and the changing global landscape to which they are adapting. They address topics such as the relation between the local and global roles of universities, the changing nature of the purposes of higher education, the role of Chinese diaspora in the global knowledge network and of course the construction of the so-called ‘world class university’. Papers can be downloaded here. The workshop also set up a blog where the papers can be discussed.

Last month’s Far Eastern Economic Review included an article by Simon Montlake on Singapore’s Global School House strategy. The strategy has been formulated to contributes to Singapores development as a regional and global hub for research and development and – in Montlake’s words – to shed a reputation as a stodgy, scripted society, where creativity is dulled by overzealous government regulation.

The strategy targets a growth in foreign students from 80,000 now to 150,000 by 2015. This growth obviously cannot be solely absorbed by Singapore’s two major universities, NUS and NTU and therefore Singapore is creating linkages with foreign partners. Not just out of necessity, but – according to Montlake – also as a matter of prestige:

Singapore also wants to tap this growing market. While its homegrown universities have some appeal to other Asians, a far juicier prize is to partner with a prestigious Western school, essentially outsourcing world-class education to Singapore.

He states that, since 1998, around 16 universities have forged linkages with local institutions, typically in the form of joint graduate programs. In a recent article in the journal ‘World Development’, Kris Olds (University of Wisconsin and Global HigherEd) identifies 25 of such ventures (click picture to enlarge):

Most of these initiatives are modest in scope, and several have been successful. However the Singapore government has slowly been expanding its ambitions by luring whole foreign university campuses to the country. Montlake observes that this has presented slightly more difficulties for the Singaporean government:

Persuading Harvard to open up in Singapore—and dilute its premium brand—sounds like a pipe dream. But surely other, less haughty foreign universities could be induced to take the plunge, given the right incentives and a forward-looking strategy? Singapore has never made any secret of its large financial resources and its willingness to use them to promote industries in which its governing elite believe it has an edge over competitors, such as biotech and environmental services.

I’ve written several posts on the developments in the past years. The University of Warwick declined Singapore’s offer to establish a campus in Singapore (due to worries about academic freedom and financial risks) while the University of New South Wales did proceed with the venture, but ultimately had to close its doors after three months in operation. In my latest post on the issue I have tried to give some explanations for the UNSW Asia debacle but attributed the failure mainly to an internal conjuncture of events, mainly the combination of overambitious managers and frequent change of leadership. But these explanations leaves open the question why the global schoolhouse strategy is moving forward so difficultly.

Montlake seems to point to the specific characteristics of the Singaporean case and questions the viability of the Singaporean strategy:

For all the money it showers on arts and culture and promoting multicultural events, Singapore’s main pastime is still shopping. Perhaps it needs to take more seriously its campaign to make the city fun. Decades of single-party, paternalist government has bred political apathy. Singapore wants to attract foreign talent, but doesn’t let its own citizens speak out of turn.

Olds applies a broader perspective and questions the viability of institutional globalization in general:

…the failure of the Singaporean Economic Development Board to convince globally recognized research universities (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Imperial College), as well other research active universities (e.g., the University of Warwick, LSE), to establish overseas campuses in Singapore highlights a disconnect between Government of Singapore policy goals and the reality of institutional globalization in higher education at this point of history.

I myself have been skeptical about universities establishing branch campuses in countries where governments cannot guarantee academic freedom and other basic principles such as the equality been men and women (for instance as is the case in higher education in Saudi Arabia and KAUST). On the business side of the story, my skepticism is at least as big. Especially in the case of public institutions, steps to start operations across borders need to taken with caution. The losses of failed ventures abroad will eventually be passed on to the students.

On the other side, there are clear mutual benefits that can come out of these initiatives. Importing countries can expand their access to higher education and improve their quality. At the same time, exporting institutions can utilise their expertise to do this efficiently and use their legitimacy to do this according to their own principles and act as a driver of change.

“The bureaucratic police state will no doubt buy the best scientific equipment and personnel that money can buy. But it cannot provide the atmosphere of criticism and openness that scientific research needs to flourish.”

Saudi Arabia does not exactly have a long history of higher education. Even though oil production transformed the country into one of the richest in the world, the higher education system has not kept pace. In 1975 a Ministry of Higher Education was established, but it took until this century before serious investments were made in the creation of universities and colleges. Royal oil dollars are now pored into the system in order to create their own Yales and Harvards:

King Abdullah has provided $10-billion of his own money to establish a graduate-level science-and-technology university, instantly making it the sixth wealthiest university in the world. And the government has lifted a decades-old ban on private institutions, offering free land and more than $10-million toward scholarships and building costs for what they hope will become the Harvards and Yales of the Middle East.

But the Chronicle article agrees that a bottomless bank account might not be the only ingredient needed for a top-notch education system. Saudi Arabia obviously is not a country where knowledge and information travels freely. Other problems for which solutions cannot simply be bought nor copied are the existence of a class room culture where rote learning is stressed over innovative and creative thinking, the existence of a system with a serious lack of attention for research and institutions where career advancement is more related to political ties than academic merit. In addition, the country has shown to be more interested in producing imams instead of the businessmen or scientists that the economy needs.

But things will change in the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). According to Ali Al-Naimi, the minister for petroleum and mineral resources and the official who will head this new project, the university will have an unprecedented level of independence. “Life on campus will be free. Scholars can dream, think, and innovate with a lot of freedom”, according to Al Naimi.

In developing the university, the government has hired an international advisory team consisting of – among others – the president emeritus of Cornell and the rector of Imperial College London. But it’s not just in the public sector that serious investments are made to create new ‘western-style’ universities:

Al-Faisal University, which is being developed by the King Faisal Foundation, an organization endowed by the sons of the former Saudi king to promote education in the kingdom, is one of the first private universities to receive permission to open and one of the few nonprofit private institutions in the country. Like King Abdullah University, it is modeling itself on Western universities, with help from Western scholars.

In the case of Al-Faisal University, Harvard Medical International (affiliated with Harvard Medical School) will be involved in the creation of the medical school, while the University of Cambridge and MIT will be designing the engineering programme.

One major issue in the establishment of these two new institutions is the gender issue. Both Al-Faisal University and King Abdullah University will become co-educational institutions. For Al-Faisal however this seems to be a stretchable concept:

Unlike at King Abdullah University, though, men and women will not be allowed to interact, in accordance with the country’s legally mandated gender segregation. The university will have split-level classrooms, where women attend the same lectures as men but from balconies surrounded by one-way glass.

An underground entrance for women — dropped off by their drivers — will lead directly to stairwells, elevators, and floors strictly segregated by gender. But since even those accommodations would raise many eyebrows in Saudi Arabia, Al-Faisal is starting with male students only to gain social credibility first.

Also for the recruitment of staff, the gender segregation might become an issue. Nature anticipates on this issue by questioning the search for KAUST’s president, to be selected by an international committee:

What if the committee chooses a woman? “The search is merit-based; if a woman is the best candidate we will have no problem with that,” says Mohammed Mulla, a university spokesman.

Members of the search committee say that it may be difficult to find a woman willing to take the post, given the severe restrictions placed on women in the kingdom, but insist that if there is any interference in their choice they will resign.

I guess you can hire experts from MIT and Cambridge, you can model yourself after Harvard and Yale, you can invest billions of oil dollars, but I wonder whether you can create a ‘western style university’ (or any university) when ideas and information have to travel through ceilings and one-way windows… On the other hand, such changes don’t come overnight. But I guess it’s a start.

Al-Faisal university will open its doors in September 2008. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will start in September 2009.

From this weeks Times Higher Education Supplement:

Nottingham owns a 37.5 per cent share in the Ningbo campus, a joint venture with the state-owned Wanli Education Group. Wanli provided the infrastructure, worth £14 million. Nottingham has spent a further £5.3 million in its Malaysia campus, in which it owns 29.1 per cent of the shares.

A spokesman for Nottingham said that the university’s current deficit of Pounds 8 million on a £345.9 million income was not tied directly to the China and Malaysia developments, as it had spent more than £200 million over the past decade on infrastructure in Nottingham as well as abroad.

“We confidently expect handsome surpluses from China and Malaysia within five years at most. We estimate that the campuses in Malaysia and China already have a combined value of £150 million. That’s a pretty phenomenal return on a £40 million investment – of which we contributed less than 25 per cent,” he said.

No comment…

In the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Wendy Nelson Espeland (Northwestern University) and Michael Sauder (University of Iowa) present an impressive paper on Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds. The paper shows how the rise of public measures change social behaviour by looking at the law school rankings of the US News and World Report (USNWR). It struck me how many of their findings and arguments can be applied to international rankings as well. In some cases, their arguments might even be stronger for international rankings and expose additional complications.

Through processes of what the authors call ‘reactivity’, the independence between the measures and the social world they target are threatened. Rankings thus not just measure the current situation; they define it as well by changing behaviour. They identify two mechanisms of reactivity that are important in this respect: ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ and ‘commensuration’. Here, I will discuss the self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism and make an attempt to ‘translate’ this to the level of global higher education and global rankings.

The authors define self-fulfilling prophecies as processes by which reactions to social measures confirm the expectations or predictions that are embedded in measures or which increase the validity of the measure by encouraging behaviour that conforms to it (p.11). These processes shape the reactivity of rankings in different ways:

(i) First of all, rankings have an effect on external audiences. Rankings magnify otherwise statistically insignificant differences between law schools and the distinction produced by these rankings become taken for granted. As one of the interviewees puts it (p.12):

“rankings create inequality among schools that are rather hard to distinguish. They create artificial lines that then have the danger of becoming real”

This is because even small differences have an effect on the quantity and quality of applications that a school receives in the future. Almost all admissions directors in the study reported that students’ decisions correlate with rankings.

To my knowledge, such correlations have not yet been demoonstrated for student choices at the international level. However, considering that quality is even less transparent at the international level than at the national level, it is likely that many students looking for international opportunities are guided by international rankings such as the Times Higher education Supplement Ranking (THES) or the Shanghai Jiao Tong Ranking (SJT) and, in the case for MBA’s, the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings (FT). The number of people arriving at my blog (especially from developing countries), searching for terms like ‘university ranking institution X’, ‘prestigious university country Y’ support this.

One problem here is of course that these international rankings don’t have a lot to say about education. This especially goes for the SJT ranking which is completely based on research performance. One criterion for education quality is used but this is measured by the number of alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, and accounts only for 10% of the total score

(ii) A second mechanism for self fulfilling prophecies emerges through the influence of prior rankings on survey responses. The USNWR uses two types of surveys, one for academics, one for practitioners. The interviews in the paper show that many academics are not sufficiently informed about other law schools in the US and therefore base their judgements on….previous rankings. And the same is probably true for the practitioners, as these quotes show:

“Well, hell, I get the rankings and I get 184 schools to rank. I know about [this school], something about [that school], I know about [my school] obviously, and I’ve got some buddies here and there so I feel like I know something more about some of those schools. But beyond that, guess what, I’m basing these decisions on the rankings; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If partners [at a law firm] do anything to prepare themselves for this [reputational survey], they probably go out and get a copy of past USN reports and fill it out from that.”

The THES rankings also use peer surveys and recruiter surveys as part of their rankings. For the THES ranking this is a crucial part with academic peer surveys determining 40% and recruiter surveys determining 10% of the overall ranking. But even though surveys determine 50% of the overall rankings, the surveys are conducted in a very poor manner and therefore lack any credibility (see the discussion here)

Espeland and Sauder’s argument that a lack of information about other schools or universities make prior rankings a crucial determinant for future rankings, is of course even more valid in the international domain. For the THES rankings, each peer was asked which area of academic life they are expert in, and then asked to name up to 30 universities they regard as the top institutions in their area. I expect that each peer will list a few – let’s say 10 – universities with which they cooperate. That are of course the institutions they will have some knowledge of. The other 20 are probably based on reputation, and thus…previous rankings. We might think we know something about Stanford or Cambridge and therefore include them in the personal top 30? But why not Uppsala or Utrecht or Iowa? Because they are not in the top 20 of the rankings?

The fact that the THES responses to the surveys were very Asian and Anglo Saxon biased, together with the relatively high scores of Asian, American, UK and Australian universities, confirms this point. For the recruiter surveys, one can expect the same self-fulfilling prophecy effects.

(iii) A third mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy is that resources are distributed on the basis of rankings. In the case of US law schools, these are basically internal university decisions so that law schools are competing with other programmes. As the authors note, some administrators use rankings as a heuristic to help allocate resources because other benchmarks are lacking. And if resources are allocated by ranking or by the potential for rank improvement, rankings reproduce and intensify the stratification they are designed to measure (p.14).

This is of course a tricky issue, especially for the case of international rankings. Does a university in a country receive more money from government (because in most countries that is still where much of the money is allocated) because of high rankings, or because it performs better? The crucial question here is of course, according to what and whom? Assuming that this is a reactive process, the criteria used in important rankings become indicators for policies and for resource allocation.

I think that USNWR rankings have a more explicit effect on higher education in the US than international rankings have on other universities. However, in my own experiences and interviews, it has become apparent that international rankings play a role in setting institutional priorities, albeit in a more implicit manner. This is likely to have an effect on the allocation of resources as well.

What we need to keep in mind here is that the rankings are developed in specific contexts, while national needs emerge from another context. If ranking criteria are prioritised at the cost of specific national or regional needs, the ‘objective quality’ might compromise the real functions of higher education. This is also related to the next mechanism.

(iv) A final mechanism is what the authors call ‘realizing embedded assumptions‘: rankings create self-fulfilling prophecies by encouraging schools to become more like what rankings measure, which reinforces the validity of the measure. They impose universal definitions of what a school or a university should look like or what they are supposed to do. As a result, schools may feel pressures to abandon missions that are not measured in rankings.

From an international perspective, the example of using international students as one of the criteria, confirms this point. International rankings that give a score for the number of international students do this on the assumption that it is good to have an international campus and that it is a measure of quality if students from around the world want to attend that university. For a large part this assumption is valid, but not if we look at the outliers. On the one hand there are universities, like in Australia, where the number of international students have become so substantial that one might ask whether this is an indicator of quality or an indicator of commercial interests over academic ones. The quality of the international students for instance is not measured in any way.

On the other side, there are many many countries with an unmet demand from their national population. Here, a delicate issue comes forward in relation to international rankings. If ranking criteria become policy indicators or performance measures, one runs the risk of policies becoming detached from the need of a specific country or university. Some time ago, I indicated this by pointing to a middle income country that increased its inflow of international students in order to appear higher in the rankings. This was a country which has a high and unmet national demand for higher education…

Other measures, such as the numbers of Nobel Prize winners or highly cited academics might give an indication of the quality of research in already established institutions, but for the bulk of the world’s universities, this should not be a priority at all. An example is for instance that a university in that same country recently attracted a well known ‘academic super star‘ for a newly established Chair. The question can be posed here whether this person’s annual appearance – probably for a day or two each year – adds anything to the research quality of such an institution.

This is not just an issue in lower or middle income countries. For instance, developments in knowledge transfer are important in developed as well as developing countries. But not recorded in any ranking. In many Western European countries, the inclusion of second generation immigrants into the higher education sector is a policy priority. Again, this is not recorded in any of the international rankings. Etc, etc… An over-emphasis on rankings might push such important policies and missions to the background.

In my opinion, the fact that certain assumptions about what a good university is (and even what a so-called ‘world class university‘ is), is very much dependent on national circumstances. Or at least it should be. If these assumptions become embedded in rankings, this national context is totally overlooked. Due to the processes of reactivity, rankings might have some serious negative effects for the national (and regional) missions of universities.

***

Clearly, the self-fulfilling prophecy effect of rankings is a serious one. One of the interviewees, a Law Professor, even called it a ‘self-fulfilling nightmare’. Rankings can have very positive effects in creating awareness of the quality of education and research within institutions. However, the Espeland and Sauder article shows that they might have detrimental effects as well, especially if we extrapolate the findings to international rankings and the global higher education landscape.

For the organisations that develop the rankings this means that they need to be very precise in ranking universities worldwide (this message clearly goes out to Quacquarelli Symonds, the company behind the THES rankings and the Fortune Business school ranking). Especially the survey method, even if the surveying was methodologically correct, is very sensitive to the self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism. Since universities and governments react to rankings in a very real way, that is by conforming to their criteria (either explicitly or implicitly), they have the responsibility to be accurate and to choose the right criteria. And the right criteria are not always those that are easily measured! And they are not always those that are important in the American, British or even OECD-countries context.

The main message however goes out to policy makers and university administrators. Since these rankings are developed in a certain setting, they will not always correspond to national or regional circumstances and societal and economic needs. The most irresponsible thing to do is to conform to rankings on the short term and therewith compromise the real missions and policy objectives on the long term.

The UNSW debacle in Singapore and the exit of Johns Hopkins last year, have dealt a serious blow to the Global Schoolhouse strategy of the Singapore government. Singapore’s neighbor Malaysia announced a similar strategy last year. With this strategy, Malaysia becomes one of the most interesting examples of the way that higher education is globalizing nowadays. A major exporter as well as importer of higher education, with foreign universities within its borders and Malay universities establishing branches outside Malaysia.

First of all, Malaysia has long been sending many of their students and university staff abroad, especially for postgraduate studies, because their own system could not absorb the increase of students in the last decades. In addition, the racial quota for public universities to enroll Malay forced a lot of students from Chinese and Indian backgrounds to pursue their higher education abroad. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in private universities and colleges that have been able to absorb many of these students and the Malay that were not accepted in the public sector. Despite this, the flow of Malaysian students abroad – especially to the English speaking countries – has remained substantial (see table).

Malaysian students abroad 1999-2004

In addition to sending students abroad to pursue their education, the Malaysian government has also admitted higher education institutions into Malaysia in order to meet the increasing demand of higher education in the country. The establishment of such branch campuses has to fulfill a wide range of legal requirement (on ownership issues, but also on the content of education), but this has not kept universities from establishing these branches. The best known examples are Monash University, Curtin and Swinburne from Australia and Nottingham University from the UK. Although these partnerships were usually based on so-called sandwich programmes (where part was done in the home country of the university), they now also offer full degrees in Malaysia.

But in recent years, both the flows of students as well as the flows of institutions are no longer one way but now go both ways. Although public universities in Malaysia do not undertake activities abroad – and probably they are not allowed to – the private ones seem to become more and more active. You can now actually obtain a Malaysian degree in London, offered by the Lim Kok Wing University, well known in Malaysia for its IT and Design programmes. And this university is not just a little office somewhere in London but is established in a beautiful old English building. But Lim Kok Wing did not stop in London. It’s also the first Asian university to establish a branch campus in Africa, in Botswana to be precise. Recently, other education institutions are following and are also expanding abroad.

And now the Malaysian government wants to make Malaysia a true education hub for the region, more or less like its southern neighbor. The Ministry of Higher Education has set a target of 100,000 students for 2010. Growth will probably mainly be sought in the region and in the Middle East. Together with Singapore, Malaysia probably offers the best quality higher education in Southeast Asia, although Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia are catching up. Due to language (and cultural/religious) issues, Malaysia is popular for Indonesian students, especially for those that cannot get into the local public universities in Indonesia and cannot afford the top private ones or higher education abroad. For Chinese students Malaysia might be popular because of the widespread Chinese influences in Malay society, more apparent though in the private institutions than in the public ones. More recently, especially after 9-11, Malaysia has also become a popular destination for Middle Eastern students. Yesterday, the Star reported on an agreement between Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed and his Saudi counterpart Dr Khaled Mohamed Al-Anqari on sending the Saudi students to Malaysian universities(*). In addition to the Middle East, students coming from Africa (especially Libya, Sudan and Kenya) are also on the rise (see table; click to enlarge).

Foreign Students in Malaysia 1999-2003

To reach the goal of 100,000 international students, the government will need to double the intake of foreign students. There are obviously pros and cons to a strategy like this. For many, a first reaction would be to ask why a government wants to increase the number of international students if it barely has the capacity to meet the demand of its own people? On the other hand, it can generate extra financial resources (if the fees for foreign students are profitable) by which the education of the Malaysian population can be supported. Obviously creating more multicultural campus will also have more intangible positive effects. And the quality of education can increase if these foreign students will be of such quality that they will positively influence the academic atmosphere and quality in the universities. And of course there are the economic effects through spending and consumption from the students and through the new jobs that are created for such an expanding higher education sector.

So…should the Singapore case make the Malaysian government nervous? Maybe not yet, but they better keep an eye on the developments in their neighboring city state. Malaysia’s plans are not as ambitious as Singapore’s ‘grand’ strategies and they are less dependent on foreign providers than is the case in Singapore. But I hope they will not become obsessed with the projected number of 100,000, and instead just focus on the overall quality of their higher education. Then the foreign students will follow automatically…

Saudi government officials have been traveling the world for the past months in order to find ‘a conducive environment’ for their students to study. Especially because it was getting harder for them to get visas in the UK and the US. I remember that one of their officials visited Australian campuses as well, in order to ‘ínspect’ the universities here. I have not heard anything about this issue since…maybe the Australian culture was not considered very conducive by these government leaders, that always know best what is good for ‘their’ citizens…

But even Malaysia was not perfect. Saudi female students had specific requirements: “They have to travel with their chaperone who are either their male family members or husbands, so visas can be a problem. Another issue is dressing – some female students want to keep their faces covered.” The Minister said he would look into these issues… Covering the faces is not allowed in Malaysian public universities. And I think universities shouldn’t change their values just to benefit more from the international higher education market. Believe me, I work in Australia, so I should know!

After three months in operation, the Singapore adventure of the University of New South Wales has come to an end. Another 22 million Singapore dollars down the drain. The decision to establish a branch campus in Singapore was taken in 2005 and already led to some commotion at that time (see this post). In 2005, UNSW from Australia and the University of Warwick from the UK were the only two foreign universities granted special status by the Singaporean Government (through its Economic Development Board, EDB) to set up a fully fledged independent teaching and research institution offering undergraduate degrees (the UNSW ASIA website has been taken down but click here for some info from the old website and here for some facts).

At that time, the senate of Warwick declined the offer of the Singapore government. The official reason for the Warwick senate to vote against the venture was the big financial risk. An additional reason however was the concern about the lack of academic freedom. UNSW had a different opinion, after all there was “no such thing as absolute freedom of speech in any country”.UNSW opened the doors of its Asia Campus at the beginning of the 2007 academic year, planning to reach a population of up to 15,000 students on the long term. But the campus will be closed down after only one semester:

Before making this decision, the University has explored an extensive range of options. However the enrollment numbers for 2007 did not meet our expectations, and this has caused us to revise our projections. The decision to close down is a difficult one but it is the prudent course of action to take.

UNSW Vice Chancellor, Professor Fred Hilmer inherited the situation when he became VC in 2006. In a press conference in the Straits Times video news he explains the UNSW decision to pull out (see the whole video here):

The economics of the campus, without significant support made it impossible to continue. While we had support for the initial concept from the EDB, as the enrollment played out and as the concept had to be changed, the risk of the venture increased.

The Economic Development Board stated that it regrets the decision of UNSW. Mr Ko Kheng Hwa, Managing Director, EDB said:

We regret that UNSW has decided to close the Singapore campus. EDB has been fully committed and has worked closely with UNSW from day one towards the establishment of its Singapore campus. EDB will push ahead with our efforts to realise Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse vision. We are fully committed to developing Singapore into a premier education hub comprising a rich diversity of high quality education institutions and programmes from all over the world.

UNSW Asia had only 140 students enrolled in its first semester, 100 of them being Singapore residents. The University had a target of 300 students for the first year. This all leaves me with two big questions:

1. What is the real reason? If the target was 300 and the enrollment was 140, would you stop an operation – that has been planned for two years and in which 17.5 million Australian dollars is invested – just after a few months? Of course not! This is just too abrupt. After investing this amount, you would at least try for a few years. Somehow I have the idea that there is more going on, but I can’t figure out what it is.

2. Public universities and their private ventures. I am sure that UNSW and UNSW Asia keep separate books. But somehow UNSW, an Australian public university, will be affected by the costs of the Singaporese adventure. This discussion has come up in relation to the South African branch campus of Monash university as well. It clearly shows the risk of letting public organizations operate privately overseas. Of course, UNSW will argue that their Australian activities will not suffer from the UNSW Asia debacle. But the money has to come from somewhere. The costs are even likely to rise because UNSW has been so decent to offer their UNSW Asia students a place at UNSW in Sydney and will make scholarships available.

Two pressing questions. Whether we will ever know the answer to the first one? I don’t know. But I hope the second one will be discussed because it addresses a fundamental issue.

UPDATE: look at this recent post for some explanations

Birnbaum is worried about the World Class University ranking crisis. Universities around the world are either proclaiming that they have attained or try to achieve this mythical status. But actually, we have no clue what it means. Philip Altbach, leader of CIHE, has written before on the cost and benefits of the race towards world class:

Everyone wants a world-class university. No country feels it can do without one. The problem is that no one knows what a world-class university is, and no one has figured out how to get one. Everyone, however, refers to the concept. We are in an age of academic hype in which universities of different kinds in diverse countries claim this exalted status-often with little justification.

Birnbaum gives some suggestion on some alternative ways to identify world class universities:

1. The Bentham System – this scheme, based on the 19th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s principle of Utilitarianism, proposes that the best universities are those that bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
2. Olympic System – In the Olympic System, teams of university faculty would compete every four years in head to head competitions combining athletic and intellectual prowess to determine their world rankings
3. Borges System – our scholarly task is merely to identify the book of true ratings from among the infinite number of books that contain very similar, but false, ratings which also exist
4. Sausage System – Throw U.S. News, the Gourman Report, the Times Hiigher Education Supplement, and other rankings created by systems of all kinds into the same bowl, add and average out the results and voila! Just as we do not know how a sausage is made (or, more to the point, we don’t want to know) the Sausage System makes it difficult to understand just what has gone into any particular set of ratings.
5. Lake Wobegon System – in Lake Wobegon, you will remember, all the children are above average. This suggests the possibility of significantly expanding the number of institutions that can be ranked as world class merely by increasing the number of institutions in each category.

But he continues on a more serious note. Building on a metaphor by Daniel Dennett, he argues that such World Class Universities can only be built if they are firmly grounded in strong and indigenous educational and social foundations Trying to develop them by using imported rhetoric, imported models and large sums of money is destined to fail:

“Attempting to build World-Class Universities without attending first to the educational and social ground on which such institutions might stand is, as Ivan Illich once said, is “like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up.” Rather than more World Class Universities, what we really need in countries everywhere are more world-class technical institutes, world-class community colleges, world class colleges of agriculture, world class teachers colleges, and world class regional state universities.”

A similar conclusion was drawn by Altbach. He concluded that as universities around the world seem to be orienting themselves to this single academic ideal, institutions and nations need to assess carefully their needs, resources, and long-term interests before launching into a campaign to build world-class institutions:

“Universities operate in both national and global contexts. The world-class idea falls into the global sphere. It assumes that the university is competing with the best academic institutions in the world and is aspiring to the pinnacle of excellence and recognition. National and even regional realities may differ. They relate to the need of the immediate society and economy and imply responsiveness to local communities. In these contexts, the nature of academic performance and roles may differ from what is expected at institutions competing in the global realm. To label one sphere world class while relegating the others to the nether regions of the academic hierarchy is perhaps inevitable, but nonetheless unfortunate.”

I wholeheartedly agree with both conclusions. Universities are one of the oldest institutions and are clearly embedded in a nations’ cultural, political and social context. This is not just the case for the Oxbridge-like universities, but also for the more recently established universities. However, this should not be a reason to avoid learning from each others experiences or models. Even copying models from other parts of the world does not necessarily lead to failure. It’s just a matter of adaptation. And it is this process of local adaptation that is made difficult by the pressures on universities to adhere to so-called global world class standards.

Economically, Europe is doing a lot better than is often claimed by ‘the pundits’. Even though Italy and France may be lagging a bit, Britain is booming and so are the Nordic countries. Central and Eastern European countries are showing even higher growth rates than the US. Slovakia, Estonia and Latvia are even growing at 10 percent or more annually. And this can even be done with a stable welfare state:

Despite nearly 50 percent tax rates and cradle-to-grave welfare benefits, Northern European social democracies like Denmark, Sweden and Finland grab half of the top slots in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of the world’s most competitive economies. “Nordic social democracy remains robust,” says Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics—”not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it.” (…) Remember those six to eight weeks of vacation every European is assured? Most Americans say they would make the same trade-off—if only their employers would permit it.

He also addresses Europe’s demographic challenges and explains why immigration can be a feasible solution for this, despite the recent problems with Muslim integration/assimilation in some countries. He argues that the greater diversity of future immigrant groups (because of the current selective policies) will solve those problems:

In the end, the specter of restive immigrant populations unsettling Europe, let alone undermining its culture, is overblown to the point of unreality.

Final point is Europe’s role in global politics. He is very clear here: the world is bipolar, and the other pole is Europe.

Consider how the EU began, 50 years ago, as a parochial Franco-German entente. Today, it’s the model for a continent. The EU expansion, subsuming a dozen former communist states, has been the surest exercise in democracy promotion since the end of the cold war.(…) It has extended the reach of democracy and free markets within and beyond its borders—in a way that American neocons can only dream about—and is becoming a model to the developing world. It is the “quiet superpower.”

Europe’s tools go well beyond EU enlargement. The EU is the largest trading and investment partner of every nation in the Middle East. The EU provides 70 percent of the foreign aid and humanitarian assistance in the world today. Almost all the world’s peacekeeping and policing forces, outside of Iraq, are staffed or funded primarily by Europeans—Lebanon, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan.

True or not, it’s significant that 50 years after the EU’s march to unity began, it is now Europe, not the United States, that’s held up as a new lamp unto nations.

I too think that the European Union has achieved a lot in its 50 years, possibly more than optimists held possible at the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. I also think that a 50 year old sometimes needs some innovative ideas and a good overhaul in order to face the future. Yes…many arguments can be brought forward against the optimism of Moravcsik. But why would you do that to someone that just turned 50 years old?

Update: I guess I was right about the arguments against Moravcsik’s optimism. Here are a few, with a rejoinder of Moravcsik. And here on bloggingheads.tv is an interesting discussion about the article (and the EU in general) between Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner.

Of course I hadn’t expected India to have turned in to one big IT science park in just one or two decades (although some publications seem to give that picture). But I had expected India’s optimism, ambition and rupees to have trickled down to other sections of society…at least a little bit. I have not been in the booming cities of Bombay, Bangalore or Chennai, but judging from my experiences from Delhi and Rajasthan, there’s a lot of work to be done, in terms of public facilities, but especially in terms of equality.

Delhi’s airport was in many ways worse of than the smaller regional airports I had just seen while visiting Indonesia and Malaysia the two months before. The roads and other public works were definitely a lot worse. Steve Hamm of Businessweek fears that the lack of investment in public space might hurt India’s progress:

The infrastructure deficit is so critical that it could prevent India from achieving the prosperity that finally seems to be within its grasp. Without reliable power and water and a modern transportation network, the chasm between India’s moneyed elite and its 800 million poor will continue to widen, potentially destabilizing the country. Jagdish Bhagwati figures gross domestic product growth would run two percentage points higher if the country had decent roads, railways, and power. “We’re bursting at the seams,” says Kamal Nath, India’s Commerce & Industry Minister. Without better infrastructure, “we can’t continue with the growth rates we have had.”

“If you have to build a road in China, just a handful of people need to make a decision. If you want to build a road in India, it’ll take 10 years of discussion before you get a decision.”

Nearly all sectors of officialdom are riddled with graft, from neighbourhood cops to district bureaucrats to state ministers. Indian truckers pay about $5 billion a year in bribes, according to the watchdog group Transparency International. Corruption delays infrastructure projects and raises costs for those that move ahead.

Rather than having successfully produced a “new middle class,” as touted in media representations of India’s success, emphasis on knowledge for development and a knowledge economy in India has had the effect of producing an elite with formidable economic strength, as well as the cultural dominance to re-imagine and negotiate meanings of Indianness.

(…) So long as those engaged in the knowledge economy are blinded by the belief that their success reflects the progress of the nation as a whole, and that their class positions are not privileged, the possibility for sparking true social and economic change greatly diminishes.