The Global Construction of Higher Education Reform

• In Event: New Research on Global Policy Processes in Education

Abstract

The chapter analyses the respective roles of local-institutional, national, regional and global agencies in shaping national higher education reform, while at the same time constituting an increasingly fecund global strategic space with a growing (but not universal) capacity to over-determine national agendas. The chapter explores the extent to which there is a universal neo-liberal policy set in higher education, the extend to which trends in reform are common across borders, and the endogenous and exogenous drivers of this global convergence. The extent of convergence should not be exaggerated. What appear to be common processes and contents are articulated through national and local systems and interests. Some nations are more engaged in cross-border processes than are others. The key underlying question is: What are the potentials and limits of national policy in this period? To what extent are common global contents - including the neo-liberal agenda - inevitable at a national level and what are the factors that determine the global construction of reform in nations and institutions? The chapter argues that differences in the character and role of the state in national political cultures, differences in educational cultures, and differences in state-university relations, are among the key factors in shaping variations in patterns of reform. These analytical issues are explored through discussion of national systems with diverse trajectories and reform agendas, including Australia, in many respects a model neo-liberal system, globally engaged in specific ways, often through the agency of higher education institutions themselves; China, where the state closely shapes a globally-sensitive reform agenda and maintains close supervision of the institutions; Singapore, where the state has engineered an equivalence between national and global strategy while partly devolving agency to the internationalized universities; and Russia, another state-shaped system, where selected neo-liberal reforms are vigorously pursued in higher education but there is modest global engagement.

Author

• Simon W. Marginson, Institute of Education, University of London