Ten Globalization Challenges to Higher Education

Ten Globalization Challenges to Higher Education Quality and Quality Assurance

Deane Neubauer

Senior Consultant, East West Center – Manoa (Honolulu)

Abstract

Contemporary globalization has rapidly developed into a complex system of circuits of exchange, interactive dynamics, and structures that collectively interact at high levels to produce rapid change affecting most aspects of human life. Like most complex systems contemporary globalization acts to produce outcomes that are difficult to foresee, but which operate to influence most aspects of the system. Higher education as an intrinsic element of contemporary globalization is implicated throughout these interactive dynamics and effects. This paper examines ten aspects of globalization which can usefully be viewed as challenges to higher education especially in its efforts to develop varied ideas and demonstrations of quality and systems of quality assurance that will be useful and sustainable in this environment.

Keywords: contemporary globalization, circuits of exchange, simultaneity of effect, knowledge society, alignment, demographic shifts, inequality, triple linkage, rankings, reductionism.

Introduction

It has become a commonplace—albeit not necessarily one of obvious implications—that much of what higher education is, and is becoming, is directly affected by what contemporary globalization is and is becoming. The two are connected in a wide variety of ways.

The more we study contemporary globalization the more researchers and observers are prone to see it as approximating a complex system, a usage which implies a large number of inter-related and interactive components, operating within a structure which may itself be changing through feed-back and feed-forward loops, which is characterized by constant change (and in many instances accelerating change), and qua system is likely to produce both unexpected and unpredictable consequences (Harvey, 1990.) The simple, but problematic assertion here is that as higher education increasingly participates within this system of complexity, its dynamics, behaviors, structures and effects, come to be ineluctably linked to (and indeed inseparable from) those of the larger system of globalization itself.

Again, much of this assertion is no doubt commonplace, and I dare say that we all give some kind of daily recognition to the truth of the proposition, whether it be to recognize the extent to which our students and faculty are linked to “international” activities , the degree to which our budgeting and search for external funds is linked to notions of global rankings, the recognition we give to the commonality of many structural similarities that are emerging in higher education throughout the world (whether in financing, “autonomy” movements, quality assurance, research commonalities, etc.), or indeed to what has become the banal levels at which the internet ties us to connections throughout the world.

Yet, it is often in the nature of “commonplaces” that their very familiarity leads us to inspect them less than we might, or to be unexpectedly surprised when things that have become so familiar, so customary, so much a part of our daily lives reveal a side to them, or produce an outcome, that is fundamentally contrary to what so quickly become our daily, iterative acceptance of these global engagements—as for example, when our computer systems get hacked, or our quality systems are compromised, or indeed, the regional or global financial system suddenly “heads south” with disastrous consequences for virtually all participants in the system.

Globalization study is replete with contradiction. Within the reach of globalization one frequently finds instances in which two contradictory assertions can be made about the same subject—both of which are true under closely related conditions, for example that globalization dynamics promote convergence and integration even as they also promote particularity and differentiation. Part of this phenomenon is accounted for by the very nature of the underlying and pervasive interdependence, which is the hallmark of globalization—because interdependence always cuts both ways. In instance after instance the very linkages and aggregations (of energy, technology, knowledge, labor, capital) that allow for the dramatic positive advances of globalization (in economic growth, production, trade, knowledge, new technologies, etc.) can also be equally responsible for simultaneous and often stunningly rapid onsets of negative outcomes that seemingly can catapult out of control—again, the global financial crisis is an excellent, but hardly the only, example. The dependence side of interdependence is often insubstantially valued in investment and policy equations, and often equally with dire consequences.

In the following I offer ten propositions about globalization’s role within contemporary higher education and its overall relevance to the broad approach to quality assurance. The discriminating reader will see that propositions # 2 and # 8 are closely related, and both in turn might be considered special cases of proposition # 4. All deal with the linkage between the permutations within the global economy and the many ways in which these generate signals to which national economies and higher education must respond. I choose to list them separately to emphasize discrete elements of these linkages.

Proposition 1: Demographic dynamics in part created by and in part articulated through globalization affect the ability of countries to meet Higher Education access and capacity challenges.

In terms of global population growth, we are 2/3’s there. The dramatic—if familiar--uptake in global population that began in the 1950’s continues its climb toward a projected leveling off point in the decade of 2040-50. The familiar UN population projection curve and the different configuration of figure 2 illustrate the phenomenon in recent historical terms. With current global population at an estimated 6.9 billion, current projections foretell an increase of close to 3 billion more over the next three to four decades.