Regionalization of education in Asia: changing patterns, major challenges and policy responses

Citation

Neubauer, D. (2012), "Regionalization of education in Asia: changing patterns, major challenges and policy responses", Asian Education and Development Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeds.2012.57301aaa.002

Regionalization of education in Asia: changing patterns, major challenges and policy responses

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Asian Education and Development Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1.

Global interdependence continues to evolve and intensify across a wide and oft-times bewildering array of endeavors. In nation after nation, society after society we observe rediscoveries of the importance of education to “the social enterprise” with intense and particular emphases on its role in economic development and realization and civic engagement. Throughout the world we can see an increased awareness of how critical the linkages of global interdependence are to what societies are and what they aspire to be. The numbers are staggering. As we seek to name, describe and analyze the circuits of exchange that constitute global interaction, they seem to become more numerous by the week. Across a wide variety of interactive patterns the numbers of participants to these phenomena continue to grow. A recent report informs us that China now has 500,000,000 internet users – exceeding the collective population of the entire European Union.

As global society continues to grow and experience new and often painful consequences such as the current euro crisis, one can readily “read” the increased role that regionalization is coming to play within this rapidly transforming global society. In a way that the essays in this volume seek to explicate regions have come to operate as translators or pathways in the global experience. Regions that historically emerged in human consciousness through the facts of geographic proximity and economic advantage and necessity are, through the dynamics of contemporary globalization, themselves being transformed as they employ features of cultural, linguistic, and economic familiarity as virtual portals to the increasingly relevant global commons and marketplace. And, as John Hawkins details in his piece in this collection, this process of “new regionalization” is given form and substance for traditional regions within these global dynamics that have both centrifugal and centripetal effects. Some aspects of society, culture, economy, and the polity are bound more closely into common identities, whereas others are projected into this novel world of globally attenuated identities and engagements. The result is a complex flux of the familiar in a state of continual engagement with the novel, in what many commentators characterize as some version of a global/local exchange.

Education as a social enterprise stands at the center of these activities. It is simultaneously a carrier of social and cultural traditions (the means by which cultures seek to sustain themselves in the world), a source of innovation and invention (a means by which societies seek to keep pace with and seek advantage in a changing world), and a translator and monitor of the surrounding world (a means by which populations at all levels of potential integration are encouraged to establish “linkages” to that world). As the premiere institutions of the educational hierarchy universities have long been recognized to perform three critical functions for society, and especially for those who make direct use of their services: knowledge transmission (the teaching function), knowledge creation (the research function), and knowledge conservation (the library/curator function.) In the emerging world of growing global interdependence, these functions are increasingly performed by those outside the historically structured university or higher education sector, and by those outside the historic boundaries of the nation state. These activities can now be found to occur as much in the private sector (by companies and institutions only tangentially related to higher education), through virtual rather than direct means of engagement and communication (via the internet), and by novel social organizations emerging from civil society.

The papers presented in this issue illustrate some of the many ways that the “new regionalization in education” is emerging as a result of these rapid but persistent patterns of educational change. In the first article I deal with the various ways in which regionalization has been “languaged” over the past decades, giving particular attention to how the transforming elements of the knowledge society tend to shift focus from a notion of “regionalism” – a social and political program to seek commonalities within a particular geographic region – to regionalization – seeking patterns of affinity and exchange through both virtual and in-place structures. Within higher education this emergent pattern of regionalization is promoting novel vehicles for governance – ways of linking HEIs together in terms of their structures and resources. I offer suggestions for how these emergent structures might be more ably theorized and from that yield potentially new and useful catalogues of behaviors, outcomes, exchanges, governance structures, etc., all of which would permit us to launch more coherent research.

This approach is echoed to some degree in the article of Miki Sugimura who focusses on regional networks and international cooperation among higher education institutions. Her contention is that this cooperation comes about in large part through the emergence of “systems of multi-layered cooperation” that simultaneously impel institutions in the directions of intra- and inter-regional integration. In sorting out these endeavors she details activities occurring at the level of summative organizations – those created explicitly to promote such integration, supra-university level organizations if you will – and those that directly link universities in cooperative efforts. Sugimura explores these threads through both well-established networks and more newly emergent forms, seeking to create an empirical map of cooperation and integration, and sketching through the entire effort some of the shapes of what regional higher education may soon become at various levels of exchange, including that of quality assurance.

Molly N.N. Lee offers a parallel exposition of the forces leading to increased regionalization and the variety of forms these take in cross-boarder higher education exchanges and their various governance implications. In particular she maps the types and kinds of university exchanges, e.g. in the movement of peoples (students, professors, scholarly experts), academic currencies (e.g. in twinning programs, credit transfer, and joint degrees), physical presence, as in the establishment of cross-national branch campuses, and academic exchanges (e.g. through journals, seminars, conferences, and increasingly through social networking including webinars). At the supra-university level a host of inter-governmental initiatives have arisen that involve virtually all of the countries in the region as well as a broad range of non-governmental activities including many of those that she herself has overseen and fostered during her long tenure with UNESCO Bangkok. Among this well-developed UNESCO work, she points out that there are “more than 500 established chairs and interuniversity networks, out of which 60 chairs and 8 [University Twining and Network Programme] UNITWIN networks are based in the Asia-Pacific region.” Of perhaps singular importance to this phenomenon has been the rapid and extraordinary growth of multi-national and cross-boarder quality assurance activities (signified best by the Asia Pacific Quality Network [APQN]) which has done much to create common platforms of comparability for higher education work throughout the region, and to link it to similar endeavors in other regions, namely North America and Europe.

Regina Ordonez provides us with a quite different perspective on regionalization as she documents the extraordinary degree to which Philippine higher education has come to be focussed on its contribution of graduates to the global labor market. The input of such graduates into the global labor stream began with the significant export of nurses and doctors as early as the 1970s, but gained significant momentum during the 1990s and now has extended across a much wider arc of skills and occupations to embrace not only nursing, but teacher education, business administration, information technology, hotel and restaurant management, and maritime skills. As numerous studies have suggested, this linkage of Philippine higher education to the global market has developed both feedback loops, in which Philippine higher education becomes attenuated to this “export industry” (many would say is “distorted by”) and has organized itself toward these markets (many would say to the disadvantage of domestic Philippine needs), and feedforward loops in which receiving countries increasingly seek to manage aspects of their trained labor force needs through the importation of same, often at the expense of investment in their own higher education capacity. As Ordonez carefully documents, this entire phenomenon creates unique problems for the country's educational governance structure and quality assurance mechanisms. My view is that the Philippine case study provides exceptional insight into the creation of what are becoming virtual higher education networks supported by and furthered by the dynamics of contemporary globalization.

In two other selections Krissanapong Kirtikara provides us with a very instructive study of how Thailand is seeking to develop a within country regional higher education community based on Thai technical universities, and Anthony Welch documents the limits of higher education regionalism across the vast reach of Indonesia.

Given the rapid expansion of higher education in Thailand over the past several decades accompanied by equally rapid population growth and uneven economic development, Thailand found itself in a situation with a relatively large number of smaller and in many cases under-resourced higher education institutions focussed in part on the mission of training graduates with technical skills. Through a consolidation of institutions conducted by the Commission on Higher Education (of which Kirtikara was at one point the Secretary General), the Rajmangala University of Technology system with nine regional universities, was created, consolidating over 30 campuses, spread over 20 provinces. The challenges faced by the Commission and the University are in many ways similar to those being confronted by the Asia-Pacific region as a whole: seeking to align uneven and highly differentiated capacity with emergent and shifting educational needs; distributing or gaining access to resources to assure that quality is both established and maintained; and dealing with the existential fact that the very technological needs that one is seeking to educate for are changing literally moment by moment. Kirtikara's exposition of the Thai case – quite in the manner of that by Ordonez – generalizes far beyond the bounded national point of view to illustrate some of the critical dynamics of global higher education. Both emphasize that one very important aspect of regionalization is expanding the available field of resources to meet critical and continually growing educational needs.

Welch structures his analysis around the dilemma seemingly faced by Indonesia as the most populous nation in southeast Asia, and as such, one with enormous higher educational needs. At one level Indonesia has been an active participant in virtually every cross-national effort to promote regional cooperation: a key member of the ASEAN Universities Network (AUN), the Association of Universities of Asia and the Pacific (AUAP), and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU). At another level Indonesia's achievements from such endeavors are often more formalistic than real. As Welch points out, “its relatively peripheral status in the global knowledge system,” is attributable in large measure to critical domestic issues of “institutional governance, limited regulatory capacity, quality, corruption and financial constraints, all [of which] serve to inhibit a more robust engagement in regional initiatives.” Welch employs the relative “thinness” of Indonesia's participation in regional higher education efforts to contrast those of the region as a whole with the “more robust” and “mature” European efforts which have led in the direction that may be the aspiration of Asian regionalism – a kind of regulatory regionalism – but which as a whole are inhibited by a set of limitations that represent the gap between policy pronouncements in the direction of regionalization compared with subsequent implementation.

In the concluding selection of this special issue Hawkins examines the whole of this continuum, situating Asian regionalization efforts in the oft-cited rhetorical frame of “harmonization” of disparate higher educational systems. As indicated above, Hawkins’ primary argument is that shorn of its comforting political rhetoric, much of the reality of contemporary regional efforts at cooperation and integration – at all levels, not just in the higher education arena – involves a constant and dynamic tension between sets of centrifugal forces that impel nations toward each other in a spirit of regional cooperation and benefit and centripetal forces that sharpen awareness of their differences and competitive rivalries. In making this case he places higher education squarely in the context of continuing global interdependence and the global economy. During periods of global prosperity and expansion, regional cooperation and education exchange – much like all trade – seems to provide margins of benefit for all. As is often said: a rising tide lifts all boats. In times of economic contraction, however, competition for place and position – for retaining the position and resources that a nation already possesses – necessarily becomes competitively arrayed against those of others. So go the structural dynamics of regionalization in general, effecting a constant tension that must necessarily be accepted as part of the overall equation that is sought to yield collective benefits for all participants. The burden of Hawkins’ argument is that by examining the European move to integration we can appreciate both the promise of such harmonization efforts and their difficulties. Participants must be clear that movements in the direction of harmonization need to begin at the empirical level: exchanges across the institutional structures of higher education must take place across the many functions that make up this process. That, ultimately, is the lesson of the Bologna process, even as it was that of the US experience in harmonization in its higher education system over the whole of the post-war period.

This first issue of Asian Education and Development Studies is intended to establish some points of reference for a continuing discussion of the many inter-related issues that link education among the many nations of the Asia-Pacific and that open doors toward continued movement toward regionalization. I would like to thank the contributors for their efforts in taking us in this direction.

Deane Neubauer