Times, Measures and the Man: the Future of British Higher Education Treated Historically and Comparatively

This article is a tribute to the life work of Maurice Kogan. Very little of higher education's landscape in the United Kingdom has remained unchanged over the past four decades and this article sets out to analyze the way the perception of the role of universities in society has changed in the intervening period. This it does through three perspectives: continuity and change, continuity in change and continuity in the midst of change. Each yields very different visions of the university. Against this ‘inside’ view, the second part of the article examines current British higher education policy from an ‘outsider’ standpoint and very particularly the current strategies towards the European Higher Education and Research Areas. It concludes by arguing that Britain's higher education policy vis a vis Europe re‐states a dilemma which these Islands have had to tackle for the best part of the past 250 Years. This dilemma is whether to lay priority on higher education as a global instrument or to endorse a more limited, less ambitious agenda of ‘European’ integration.     

Publication Names and Terms

As we analyze our country's social and economic development, the following sets of contradictions stand out in the picture of this development. These include: (1) the contradiction between the expansion of population and the growth of per capita income, (2) the contradiction between a high employment rate and a low rate of production efficiency, (3) the contradiction between a sense of common wealth and well-being and the expansion of the gaps between people's incomes, and (4) the contradiction between the policy of opening up to the outside world and the construction of spiritual culture. There are many ways to solve these contradictions, but, under the system of socialism, in addition to organizing production and the people's lives in a reasonable way, the fundamental way out of the potential impasses seems to be nothing more than strengthening the education system and developing the cause of education. When education is done well, and our people's quality is enhanced generally, then the expansion of the population would not just be an explosion in consumption; rather, it would mean an expansion in technique and skill, and an enhancement in the labor productivity and efficiency rate. Our common wealth and well-being will then also be based on ability and contribution. Then, too, we will be able, under the conditions of opening up to the outside, to absorb truly and correctly the essence of foreign cultures to help us in building up the spiritual culture of socialism in our country. Therefore, we believe that it is a mark of true foresight and acumen that the party center designated the development of education as a strategic focal point for our country's growth in the current period and for some time into the future. The "Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Reforming the Education System" pointed out that we must give the enterprise of education a tremendous boost in its development as the foundation of the nation's overall economic development. Furthermore, this resolution stipulated that the growth of the state's annual expenditure in the area of education must be kept at a higher level than the growth of the normal and regular fiscal income of the state. It also stipulated that there should be a year-to-year increase in the per-student annual average educational expenses. These very important decisions will propel with great force the development of our nation's enterprise of education and will allow it to have a greater and greater impact on our country's economic revival and recovery, its social growth, and its scientific and technological progress.     

近十年来印度高等教育改革

印度自独立以来,高等教育取得了飞速的发展与进步。近十年来,随着印度本国和世界经济社会环境的变化,印度政府对高等教育的规划与设计也随之发生了变化。为此,本文在考察了印度高等教育发展轨迹之后,从新旧两个方面分析了印度高等教育发展中的一些改革措施,并对其进行了总结与评价。     

Occupational Prestige and Professional Image of Teachers in Taiwan: A Comparison of Three Surveys

In the past four decades Taiwan was marked not only by rapid economic growth, but also by wide-ranging social, political, and cultural changes. In this fast-paced period, occupational division of work has become narrower and some functions of the family have gradually been taken over by the school. The function of the school has thus expanded. Generally, in traditional society, the school teacher's role was primarily that of guardian of cultural assets and disseminator of existing knowledge. In modem-day society, when values are becoming increasingly pluralistic, the school teacher is no longer facing a static and homogeneous state, but a swiftly changing and highly heterogeneous social environment. In this environment, the spread of knowledge is so fast that educational reform and change have become inevitable. The role of the school teacher has fundamentally changedno longer are they mere disseminators of traditional culture or existing knowledge, but communicators of social, economic, and cultural development. The work of the teacher not only affects educational function and achievement but, through molding the very values of students, is changing and consolidating social values and accelerating the speed of social progress. Based on this premise, this article studies the occupational prestige and professional image of teachers in Taiwan from the perspective of the teacher's changing role. On the one hand, through a collection of data, it provides concrete reference material for policymaking pertaining to the professional status of teachers of higher education, and, on the other, it makes a comparison with findings in our previous two surveys (1971 and 1979) to illustrate changes in the teacher's occupational prestige and professional image, thus providing reference material for raising the level of teachers and improving teacher education in the future.     

Higher Education and Industry

University research in Australia has in the past been devoted primarily to basic curiosity-initiated research based on the English model. Most senior academic staff have had advanced degrees from British universities and the ethos of pure research has permeated their work. In 1984 68 per cent of all higher education research and development was classified as basic research. The impetus for change in the early 1980s has come largely from federal government. In particular shrinking per student grants have forced universities to try to supplement their incomes from other sources. This paper summarizes and analyses some of the new initiatives and concludes with an examination of future prospects.     

中国民办高校财务运作与办学行为的实证研究

在经历了三十余年的快速发展之后,中国民办高等教育又重新站在了历史的重要转折点,面临严峻的生存危机。本研究从民办高校的财务分析入手,采用实证研究考察了民办高校办学模式中所存在的特质。研究发现:（1）我国民办高校在经费筹措方面高度依赖学费收入,尚未形成有效的多元化资金渠道;（2）政府高校评估与办学基准的调整,大幅增加了民办高校的基建支出压力,并由此导致教学运作直接成本的高度压缩;（3）民办高校主要通过学费标准优先策略、招生规模优先策略和提升院校的入学选拔性方式,扩大经费收入;（4）民办高校通过人员经费开支压缩     

Rethinking Economics and Education: Exponential Growth and Post‐Growth Strategies

Education is increasingly vocational and structured to serve the ongoing exponential increase in economic growth. Climate change is an outcome of these same economic values and praxes. Attempts to shift these values and our approach to technology are continually absorbed and overcome by the pressing motif of economic growth. In this article, Ruth Irwin uses Martin Heidegger's concept of the technological enframing of modernity to view economic growth. John Maynard Keynes's notion of economic growth (which he called the “multiplier effect”) has impacted the pace of consumerism that now permeates every aspect of knowing about the world we live in. Irwin asks us to think through technological enframing anew by looking to an early mechanical Greek artifact, the Antikythera mechanism, which depicts a cyclical notion of time used by ancient cultures to define the rhythm of economic productivity. The earth‐centric cosmos embodied by this mechanism helped the Mesopotamian economy stay within the parameters of the local ecology and demonstrates that cyclical economic growth may enable a civilization to maintain a steady state over time and survive for millennia. An earth‐centric cosmology creates a different set of values, one that emphasizes the need to regulate the pace of consumerism rather than allowing it free rein “as by an Invisible Hand.” The role of education in this exploration is twofold: first, it is a pivotal site for cultural exploration and transformation; and second, the expectations of the state strictly limit the forms education can take, so that as long as promoting economic growth defines state expectations, education will remain subservient to these values. If we aim to overcome climate change, Irwin concludes, we need to transform the expectations for education from society as well as from teachers.     

Further Probe into the Assessment of Investment in Higher Education

The question of how to assess the returns on investment in higher education has attracted widespread attention. In the past, the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the productive nature of educational expenditure affected the purpose and methods of assessing educational investment as well as the economic return on such investments in China. A great plan for China's economic construction to improve economic efficiency and quadruple industrial and agricultural production in the coming two decades was set forth at the Twelfth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. To achieve this objective, the development of education and science was among the top three priorities. This was a brilliant policy decision, advanced for the first time in China, to promote rapid growth of the national economy by developing education. It is of paramount importance in speeding up our socialist modernization.     

Public vs. private schooling as a route to universal basic education: A comparison of China and India

This article examines whether focusing primarily on public schooling can lead to more rapid achievement of universal basic education (UBE) than relying on a mixture of public and private schooling. Through a structured, focused comparison, we find China's greater emphasis on public schooling has contributed to higher enrollment, attendance, graduation rates, gender parity, and proportion of students entering higher education than India, the country with the world's largest private sector in primary and secondary education. This comparison suggests that greater emphasis on public schooling in developing countries may lead to more rapid UBE attainment than encouraging privatization.     

Research in Greek Higher Education

The state of research in Greek higher education has far-reaching consequences. The fact that university research continues to function only sluggishly undermines the universities' educational task, isolates them from the social area to which they belong, heightens the country's economic and cultural dependence, weakens social criticism, and hampers the procedures of social reform. However much teaching might form a basic axis of the university's task—which it does to such an extent that it is often confused with the whole of its existence—research is of central importance in defining the university as an institution devoted to higher education, that is, a place where a critical analysis of the production, communication, and use of knowledge is attempted.     

Higher education in Vietnam: key areas need assistance

Many developing countries are in the process of restructuring their higher education system to meet their nation's socio-economic development. As their educational budget is not unlimited, working with international educational institutions has become one of the attractive solutions to improve the quality of their education and to make it relevant to meet their nation's educational demand for economic development. This paper identifies some key issues which have prevented the Vietnamese higher education system from serving effectively its country's open-door policy and provide necessary recommendations to help Vietnam overcome its short-comings and weaknesses. The issues identified together with recommendations, on the other hand, may help some educational policy makers from developed countries select their fields of assistance or cooperation as well as to establish their long term educational strategies to deal with developing countries such as Vietnam.     

成功与启示:阿波罗教育集团的经营之道

在过去的30年中,阿波罗集团的异军突起可以说是美国高等教育领域中最值得人们关注的变化之一。该集团不仅连续多年在华尔街的股票市场中保持着良好的业绩,同时在美国高等教育市场中也获得了飞速的发展。在知识经济时代,随着成人教育的发展壮大、新兴的电子技术对教学方式的影响以及社会对高校管理的关注,阿波罗集团的成功经验引起了人们的广泛注意。通过对其发展历程以及独特的经营模式进行分析和研究,可以使我们更深入地理解教育理念与市场现实是如何紧密结合在一起并取得成功的。     

Open learning in India: evolution,diversification and reaching out

Distance education has a history of over four decades in India. There has been a vast growth in the number of learners who need education and thus also the corresponding channels of providing education. Due to the constraints of the traditional educational sector, open and distance learning has been found to be a workable alternative strategy in India. This paper traces the evolution and diversification of open learning in India by examining various factors that led to the growth and success of open learning. This system, as other systems of education, is not free from problems and a critique is provided on the various factors affecting the smooth functioning of India’s open and distance learning system.     

FINANCING UNIVERSITIES IN CANADA

Underfunding is the paramount problem in Canadian universities. Operating revenue per student has declined in real terms by about 15 per cent over the past 15 years. During the past three decades, revenue from governments has increased from 60 per cent of the total revenue to 80 per cent, while fees revenue has declined from 26 to 16 per cent, with the result that universities are increasingly vulnerable to political control and to financial instability. The transfers of the federal government to provincial governments have financed much of provincial transfers to universities, but the former will be reduced for at least three years and may be abolished altogether. Provincial governments, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, have controlled tuition fees for twenty‐five years in order to increase accessibility, but there has been little change in the socioeconomic composition of university enrollment. Funding for university research generally has neglected overhead costs associated with maintaining the institutional infrastructure necessary for research. Although the federal government still provides more than half of the funding for university research, the share from provincial and non‐governmental sources has been increasing.     

The Rise of the For-Profit Sector in US Higher Education and the Brazilian Effect*

What accounts for the rapid growth in the For-Profit (FP) higher education sector in the US? How will its growth influence educational opportunity and degree attainment rates in a country that first pioneered a mass higher education built largely on expanding public colleges and universities? The current US experience is a version of what I call the ‘Brazilian Effect’: when public higher education cannot keep pace with growing public demand for access and programmes, governments often allow FP's to rush in and help fill the gap, becoming a much larger and sometimes dominant provider. This is the pattern in many developing economies such as Brazil, Korea, Poland and other parts of the world. Despite new federal regulations intended to better regulate For-Profits, my prediction is that they will continue to grow over the long-term in the US not so much because they meet societal demands for diverse forms of higher education, but because of the inability of the public sector to return to the levels of public subsidies they had in the past. The result now, and in the future, is a kind of policy default: the future tertiary market will not be the result of a well thought out policy at the national or state levels, but a quasi-free market consequence that will foster lower quality providers and fail to meet national goals for increasing the educational attainment level of Americans. This article discusses how higher education policymaking is about broad issues of socioeconomic mobility and economic competitiveness, but it is also about money, big business, and political influence.     

Labour migration in Moldova: context and controls

The Republic of Moldova proclaimed its independence in 1991. Like other republics of the former USSR, during the last decade of the Twentieth Century, Moldova initiated social and economic reforms aimed at the country's transition to a market economy. A series of relevant social changes were achieved in Moldova but, contrary to initial estimates, they failed to provide the expected results. Moreover, this phase led to a deepening economic crisis, and subsequently to a catastrophic decline in living standards, the depreciation of moral and ethical norms, and insecurity. The departure of a large part of the labour force abroad, in search of jobs, has considerably diminished Moldova's human resources. Year by year, the emigration of the country's intellectuals has intensified. More and more higher education graduates, academics, school teachers and scientific researchers emigrate. No systematic and detailed studies of brain drain in Moldova exist, as the phenomenon has not been monitored at national level. The present study attempts a brief analysis of brain drain from the Republic of Moldova and offers some recommendations.     

Bringing the State Back In: restoring the role of the State in Chinese higher education

In the last few decades, in the wake of three major crises in political faith and the overall instability that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao Chinese government has sought to improve the lives of its citizens and to restore political legitimacy through rapid economic growth that has focused almost exclusively on GDP. This strong focus has brought about rapid, widespread economic growth to China, and has, by classical market standards, been a success. At the same time, issues of social development and human well-being have received less attention. Before the Hu-Wen leadership's formal accession to power, the Jiang-Zhu administration sought to adopt neo-liberal ideas and practices to reform the delivery of social services and the implementation and funding of social policy. In this context, major fields of social policy such as health, education, and housing have been going through the processes of marketisation and privatisation, which have placed much of the financial burden of meeting these social welfare needs on China's citizens. After several decades of privatisation and marketisation in the educational system, the Chinese government has been the subject of repeated criticism for failing to tackle what is popularly known as the ‘new three mountains phenomenon’, namely, the rising cost of health, education, and housing in recent years. Against the wider policy context described above, this article examines the social and political consequences of the privatisation and marketisation of education. It also discusses the major policies and strategies recently adopted by the Chinese government to restore the role of the State in the education system in order to address the negative consequences of the privatisation of education. Finally, it critically examines the main implications of major reforms undertaken in higher education in Mainland China.     

The rise and attenuation of the basic education programme (BEP) in Botswana: A global–local dialectic approach

Using a global–local dialectic approach, this paper traces the rise of the basic education programme in the 1980s and 1990s in Botswana and its subsequent attenuation in the 2000s. Amongst the local forces that led to the rise of BEP were Botswana's political project of nation-building; the country's dire human resources situation in the decades following Independence in 1966; and its propitious economic climate in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Global forces included the global circulation of the World Bank's educational discourse on the primacy of primary education as a public ‘investment’ option and Botswana's desire to be a member of the influential transnational social structure. BEP's attenuation can similarly be traced back to both local and global forces. Local forces included the growth of youth unemployment, and a sluggish economy. Global forces included the globalization of neo-liberalism which called for cost-sharing/recovery measures, and, ironically, Botswana's ‘promotion’ to a ‘middle income status’ country. While conceptually the attenuation represents a case of policy reversal and in some ways a sense of ‘loss’, empirically, the attenuation has not been of material consequence to access to ‘basic’ education. This is attributed to the ambiguous position (best captured by the term ‘doublethink’) the Botswana government¹ has adopted in relation to the issue of school fees.     

One-third of the globe: The future of higher education in China and India

China and India together account for almost 25% of the world’s postsecondary student population. Most of the enrolment growth in the coming several decades will be in developing countries, and China and India will contribute a significant proportion of that expansion, since China currently educates only about 20% and India 10% of the age cohort. Both countries are expanding the higher education sector, while at the same time seeking to improve its quality. Challenges of funding, educating qualified academics, and building a sustainable academic culture are significant. An emerging private higher education sector and developing masters and doctoral programmes are additional pressures. Internationalization is a key factor as well, as both countries seek to expand their global profile and develop strategies for international programmes. Also, higher education development is central to future economic growth of these two of the world’s fastest growing economies.     

EXPANSION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN YUGOSLAVIA

Since the late 1940's, higher education in Yugoslavia has developed with great intensity, the numbers of students, for example, growing by approximately 8.4% per annum over the last three decades.