Transcript Mobility, Markets, and Equity in Higher Education: Match

Mobility, Markets, and Equity in
Higher Education: Match or
Mismatch?
Peter Hershock
Deane Neubauer
East-West Center
The Great Transformation?
• Conflicting Dynamics of Globalization
– Both integrating and fragmenting dynamics
– Expanding commodification and privatization
– Accelerating flows of goods and services
– Heightened personal and institutional mobility
• Terms “cross border education” and
“international organization” do not do justice
to transformational nature of contemporary
globalization
Fundamental Transformations
• The dominant narrative does not do justice to the probable
course for higher education.
• “The dominant narrative- the ongoing transformation of
higher education is inevitable, our efforts should be
directed to effectively and efficiently manage it, and the
competitive dynamics of an emerging global higher
education market will foster both accelerated innovation
and tightening alignment of higher education outputs and
market needs.
• A contrary narrative: on its present heading, the arc of
higher education change may be one of ever-expanding
educational access and options while at the same time
compromising epistemic diversity and exacerbating global
educational inequity.”
Going Beyond the Cross-Border
Metaphor
• The power of metaphors to provoke inquiry and
analysis
• Understanding that seeking higher education as
cross-border activity one of its oldest
characterization—even if the meaning of borders
meant something different than contemporary
nation-state borders.
• Contemporary cross border exchange a post
WWII phenomenon, driven by national policy
needs.
Looking at the Numbers
• Global growth of higher education
– From 2.1 % in 1955 to 7.7% in 1965, 10.7% in 1975, 12.9%
in 1985, 16.2% in 1995, 19% in 2000, and 26% in 2007—
familiarly, from elite to mass to universal to use Trow’s
terms.
– Because of such growth in the base, the percentage of
students studying in foreign countries dropped from 10%
to 2%, but by 2007 there were approximately 150 million
students in global higher education.
– However, growth from approximately 110,000 in 1950, to
1.8 million in 2000 and an estimated 2.8 in 2007.
– Are we looking at increases in border crossing, or border
erosion?
Borderless Higher Education? Or,
Borders of a Different Kind?
• The role that a borderless world plays in the global imaginary—the advent
of geography-liberated freedoms of choice.
– planet-wide erasure of spatial and temporal limits to communication brought
about by the computing and telecommunications revolutions of the last
quarter century
– if borders control access, and if free market growth is pegged to everexpanding consumer options through unrestricted flows of goods, services,
people and capital, then world’s free market future will of necessity be
borderless.
• But…not so fast. Increased global integration is bringing with it
simultaneously increased global fragmentation.
• Thus, erosion of borders has not necessarily resulted in dissolution of
borders. Note Harvey’s “Uneven geographies of development.”
• Note the doubling of the income gap between the richest and the poorest
20% on the planet and the stubborn persistence of this trend.
• Top 2% of population owns 50% of global wealth; bottom 50% owns 1%
Boundaries as New Global Divisions
• Deepening divide between global North and South is
found not only among societies, but also within
them—a boundary that is sadly as real as it is
unimaginable.
• Although the expanding circuits of exchange and
accelerating flows of goods, services, people and
information that characterize the dynamics of
contemporary globalization have not brought about
the complete erasure of geopolitical boundaries, their
volume and velocity have been sufficient to bring
about a highly contingent and yet value-driven
disintegration and reconfiguration of geographical
landscapes, social, economic, political and cultural
topographies.
Complicity of Higher Education
• Not necessarily intentional
• University has played a positive and leading role in
some instances to the “structure and proliferation” of
modern values, including universality, sovereignty,
equality, precision, competition and control…
• Yet…modernization has also involved consolidating
new constellations of power and producing new kinds
of populations suited to the recursively amplifying
dynamics of nationalization, marketization, and
industrialization—disciplinary dynamics in which
higher education has been integrally involved since at
least the middle of the 19th century
HE’s “inconvenient truth”
• “Inconvenient truth,”--modern higher education represents
valueshas been infused with values structurally implicated in the
“creative destruction” of human relational ecologies.
• The “emacipatory” goals of higher education notwithstanding, the
wider ecological and climatic effects of modern industrialization
suggest that higher education has also been structurally implicated
in the potentially catastrophic degradation of natural ecologies and
the systematic attenuation of natural, cultural and epistemic
diversity.
• “Diversity” is used in a technical sense in contrast with mere variety.
In brief, diversity is a qualitative relational dynamic that emerges as
a function of complex interdependence and consists in mutually
reinforcing contributions to sustainably shared flourishing. In
contrast, variety is a quantitative index of multiplicity that entails
nothing more than either simple or complicated patterns of
coexistence.
Networks, Complexity, Volatility and
Values
• The birth of “network society” and “global
informational capitalism” (Castells, 1996/1997/1998)—
a world in which social structures and activities are
organized around and through electronically mediated
flows of information.
• Network growth is spurred and shaped by negative
(relation-stabilizing) and positive (interactionaccelerating and difference-amplifying) feedback. In
other words, network growth is internally generated as
a complex function of recursively structured flows of
information, both within the network and between the
network and its various environments.
Simultaneity
• A second key feature of the global networks that have
emerged with the development of practically instantaneous
and ubiquitous global telecommunications is that they
support interactions in a “timeless time” (Castells) beyond
the constraints imposed by either biological or logical time,
and a “space of flows” in which all places are effectively
contiguous.
• Global communicative simultaneity carries us beyond the
“space-time compression” that characterized industrial
modernization and globalization (Harvey, 1989) toward
immersion in an unbounded space-time singularity that—
like the core processes of modernization—can be seen as at
once emacipatory and disciplinary.
Uncertainty
• Importantly, beyond certain scales and scopes of interactivity and
recursivity, the dynamics of global networks foster the emergence
of complex adaptive systems
• Both self-organizing and novelty-generating.
• Distinctively, complex systems change in ways that are in principle
impossible to anticipate. While the negative feedback informing the
growth of complex networks stabilizes relations, ongoing positive
feedback both accelerates differentiation and accentuates
uncertainty.
• Thus, while global dynamics over the past half-century have been
inflected toward increasing interdependence, they have not only
been marked by increasing coherence, but also by increasing,
internally-generated volatility.
Unpredictability
• Global financial crisis an instance of lack of systemic predictability
• Emergence of complexly networked circuits of exchange is concomitant
with the ushering in of what has been usefully theorized as “reflexive
modernization”
• Occurs when the scale and scope of global interdependencies reach the
point beyond which it is impossible to externalize the costs of further
growth and development.
• Further expansions of instrumental rationality and technological control
begin resulting in the amplifying production of unpredictable risks,
hazards and threats in the face of which decisions nevertheless have to be
made.
• Early phase of growth of public goods within modernization now being
displaced by growth of public bads, such as pollution, poverty,
environmental degradation and the effects of climate change that are
unplanned, ironic consequences of continued industrialization and
globalization.
Rethinking Trajectory of Higher
Education Change
• First, it will turn out to be other than we had expected.
• In a non-linear transformation causal explanations have
only very local predicative value and—contrary to what is
suggested by dependency theory or by the educational
adaptation of the “flying geese” model of economic
development (Kuroda and Passarelli, 2009)—change is
neither being imposed (globally) from above nor
percolating up (locally) from below.
• Rather, it is being continuously effected from all
educational scales and positions as an emergent function of
cascading, unpredictable and yet non-random movements
in the direction of heightening interactivity, accelerating
differentiation and reduced organizational hierarchy.
Second
• We also may expect higher education change to make
evident and accentuate tensions between increasing
structural uniformity and standardization on one hand,
and increasing variation and flexibility on the other.
• We can expect higher education to assume forms that
are ambiguously modern and postmodern, public and
private, pure and applied, operationally demonstrating
a shift from an either/or logic to a both/and logic of
systemic, institutional and programmatic development.
• We see this in the demise of “one size fits all”
education.
Which leads to…
• As the density and quality of network interactions cross
crucial thresholds increase, we expect a shift from
predominantly contingent, instrumentally established
external relations that insure the essential integrity of
relational partners toward increasingly constitutive,
thematically improvised internal relations.
• We can expect first, the advent of global higher
education systems built cooperatively around common
practices, and then the emergence of global higher
education societies coordinated dynamically around
shared norms and values
Finally…
• The problem-to-predicament transition associated with
the rise of reflexive modernity and world risk society
seem to warrant expectations of an epistemic
revolution involving the displacement of individual
“bodies of knowledge” by “knowledge ecologies” and a
progressive re-embedding of the technical within the
ethical, a healing of the modern severance of
knowledge (knowing-that and knowing-how) and
wisdom (knowing-to) (Hershock, 2009)
• The integration of higher education into the dynamics
of global network society promises to be both
opportune and dangerous.
Consequences
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Integration of higher education into the dynamics of global network society
promises to be both opportune and dangerous.
Increased marketization, commodification and competition within higher
education are likely to reproduce the kinds of disparities found in other markets
where commodification of basic needs has resulted in the institutionalization of
entirely new classes of the poor.
As higher education comes is less fully supported and provided as a public good
and delivered instead as a marketable commodity, vast populations are likely to
find themselves disciplined into a compulsory, lifelong consumption of educational
goods and services that will reinforce rather than eliminate poverty (Hershock,
2007).
At a more systemic level, the commodification of higher education will render it
subject to market failures in the form, of sudden and unpredicted devaluations of
certain degrees or a long-term collapses of employment prospects for graduates
overall.
The marketization of higher education cannot be expected to be without the fickle
and fractious potentials associated with other forms of capitalist “creative
destruction.”
Further Consequences
• Actualizing the common practices and shared values needed to bring
about global higher education systems and societies will not inexorably
result in greater, worldwide educational diversity and equity.
• As an emergent relational quality indexing the extent to which differences
are activated as the basis of meaningful contribution to sustainably shared
flourishing, diversity cannot be either mandated or expected to happen
simply as a matter of course.
• Extent and depth of interaction needed to produce and sustain conditions
ripe for the emergence of diversity are very unlikely to be realized in
context of retrenching disciplinary silos, expanding short-term programs,
and the normalization of the wholly elective and limited relational
bandwidth that is tacitly imposed by distance education.
• Increased connectivity in higher education cannot be expected, by itself,
to enhance educational diversity.
Outside the Education Sector
• Finally, given the uneven geographies of
development it is not reasonable to expect higher
education to function as a force for greater equity
outside of the education sector.
• To the degree that the provision and purposes
higher education are aligned with market needs
the less likely it is that higher education will
contribute significantly to realizing more
equitably oriented patterns of globalization and
economic activity.
In Conclusion
• While dominant over the past two decades, neoliberalism
does not symbolize the “end of history.”
• The mobilization of higher education to serve the needs of
global informational capitalism is not a “done deal.”
Globally, we are still in positions to place higher education
mobility into more critical perspective and to work toward
aligning 21st century higher education change processes
with deepening emphases on the values of diversity and
equity as a global relations commons and global public
good—a commons and public good crucial to the activation
of especially cognitive and cultural differences as the basis
of articulating viable means-to and meanings-of truly
shared global flourishing.
Circuits of Exchange
• Sassen’s metaphor is of value because of its intuitive power
(everybody knows what a circuit is, and it is no great reach to
think of things that are being exchanged within it.)
• However, it has the great virtue of bounding our inquiry so
that we have a ready frame for our analyses.
• And, it creates possibilities for extensive and subtle research
explorations by focusing on the multiple layers that make up
the circuit. In this way, it approximates the virtues of “thick
description.” (For example, one can imagine a volume of
detailed institutional case studies of how m & m actually
affect institutions.)
Interrogating “change”
• Change: the Tokyo papers suggest in various
ways that what are termed mobility and
migration involve at least four kinds of
change:
– Genuine innovation
– Change that is profound and enduring
– Change that is more apparent than real
– Change that is gradual, cumulative, and ultimately
transformational
Dimensions of Exchange
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“Variables” that make up important aspects of the circuit of exchange that we
nominally call higher education mobility and migration, and some possible
indicators for them.
An index of mobility and migration could be created that would model the circuits
of exchange.
This could have value for:
– higher education researchers (it helps us think about how such institutions
are changing);
– policy makers (it helps them to understand how resources are being invested
and the returns being gained from them and clarifies the nature of the policy
space within which they are operating);
– higher education institutions (it helps us gain a better understanding of what
we are doing—at the descriptive level—and what some of the consequences
might be of our actions.
Factors
• Movement of students, faculty, administrators for various purposes, e.g.
• Degree study
• Less than degree study levels of degree study, durations of degree
study, etc.
• Funded and unfunded research, with or without external
appointments
• Academic meetings that range from presenting research results to
being exposed to new models of some aspect of higher education
through training
• Formal and informal relationships that “bind institutions
together”, e.g. joint agreements, mergers, MOAs
Circulation of “Ideas”
• Examine such things as the growth and diversification of faculty
participation in scholarly publication
• The growth and spread of outlets for scholarly publication—new journals,
websites, etc.
• Development, growth,, and spread of new pedagogies and their
consequences
• Development, growth and spread of “institutional standards” that could
include (but not be limited to) quality matters, governance issues (e.g.
public and private), financial modalities, ideas of “accountability”
• Development and growth of regional public policy “discourses”, e.g.
alignment, autonomy, etc.
• Development of new methods to measure research output, e.g. league
tables, citation indexes, web citation inventories (next stage in Google
searches)
Circulation of Structures
• One can separate these from ideas, although obviously they
proceed from ideas about how universities should be
organized
• Included here are discourses and suggestions about how
higher education institutions should be organized (traditional
faculties, departments, etc), the emergence of new internal
governance structures (e.g. transformation of the presidential
role from symbolic to de facto CEO), internal mechanisms of
audit, aggregation of institutional units into systems, etc.
Linkages
• This focus is on structural and behavioral endeavors designed
specifically to tie HEIs to entities above their traditional
location, e.g. consortia (both formal and informal), regional
and global associations (for research, pedagogy, leadership,
quality, etc.), membership organizations (one step more
formalized than associations and usually involving more
formal agreements and membership stakes.
• Formal structural links to entities outside the national frame,
such as joint campuses, twinning arrangements, etc.