Governing Higher Education through Markets: A Postcolonial Hong Kong Perspective

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Navigating Socio-Cultural Landscapes: Mental Health, Governance, and Philosophy in Education and Development

Proposal

This paper engages with French sociologist Michel Callon’s sociological explorations of markets (see Callon 1998a; 1998b; 2016; 2021), in order to present a postcolonial account of educational governance in the era of mobilities. To do so, I draw upon a case study of higher education massification in Hong Kong. Hong Kong deserves attention for three reasons. First, like other former British colonies, Hong Kong has a long history of public-private partnerships in which non-state actors from the private realm and global policy agencies were actively involved by the state to deliver educational and social services (Wong 2015). Contrary to most Keynesian welfare states in the West, under strict rules of fiscal discipline for self-sufficiency, government expenditure was always kept within its means and the colonial state only used accumulated financial surpluses to drive the development of a service- and construction-oriented government (Cheung 2021). Second, to evolve a global knowledge-based economy under the agenda set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Bank, in less than two decades, participation in higher education in Hong Kong has grown to a universal level. It was fuelled mainly through the rapid expansion of a non-profit private sector. Yet, like many East Asian societies, Hong Kong is facing an inevitable trend of student population decline, which poses as a major risk to an inflated higher education market. Thirdly, discursively constructed as a regional educational hub in Asia, Hong Kong is embedded in inter-urban economic, capital, cultural and population flows. It has been subjected to various national and globalising forces that are beyond the control of its single territorial government. This aspect speaks to the mobilities turn emerges in educational research and critical policy studies (see Gulson et al. 2017; Brooks and Waters 2018; Savage et al. 2021). My aim of this paper is to illustrate two points: 1. what is meant by having a market of universal higher education from a critical sociological perspective; and 2. why, in the postcolonial era, higher education is massified through the nonprofit private sector, rather than through public means as it was done in the late colonial period. The article is organised into four sections. Section one sets out the meanings of two keywords running throughout the article – governance and markets. Section two evokes Callon’s notion of framing to describe the higher education market in Hong Kong. Section three calls attention to two issues: 1. the centrality of observable configurations and statistical regularities in supply-demand relationships to the formation of a higher education market; and 2. the pivotal roles played by public-private partnerships to achieve public policy goals. In the final part, I conclude the paper by reflecting on the limits and contradictions of the state and vulnerabilities of universal higher education, such as immobile forces coming from bureaucratic hurdles within the state; stratification between public and private sectors; fiscal crisis and demographic decline. These constitute the ongoing challenges of governance and dilemmas of public-private partnerships in the rescaled state under globalisation.

Author

• Henry Kwok, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong