CGHE Webinar 92

Trends in global higher education

Date: Thursday, 18 October 2018 5:26 pm - 7:26 pm

Location: Seminar Room D, Department of Education, University of Oxford

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford

Data on the growth of participation in tertiary/higher education, student mobility, research paper output by country and university, and cross-border research collaboration, suggest that the world is undergoing a tremendous expansion in the activity and contribution of higher education.

This is especially apparent in the rise of China and Singapore as scientific powerhouses and the emergence of East Asia as an education and science zone that is larger than Europe. Yet this contribution of higher education is increasingly under-funded in most (not all) countries; and in many (though not all) countries the position of higher education is more politically exposed and less stable than it was.

The ructions of economic globalisation and income inequality in many countries are generating national/global tensions that affect not only cross-border mobility in higher education but national and local support for cosmopolitan universities. In some countries populist politicians have targeted universities, educational professionals and science.

View the presentation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wy3MjvIaPbo%3Fecver%3D1

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.