Globalization and higher education:

global markets and global public goods

Simon Marginson Monash University, Australia York University International Colloquium 6 March 2006

Five propositions
1. Globalization combines (1) world economic markets operating in real time and producing mainly private goods with (2) the first world-wide system of communications, knowledge and culture, which are predominantly public goods. The main impact of globalization in higher education is in relation to (2). Higher education is central in the constitution of research and important in communications and culture. But higher education is configured by policy to support the private economy, and organized as a quasi-market competition; and this weakens global public goods, reproduces global inequalities in the distribution of research capacity, and underpins Anglo-American domination in higher education. The preferred move: enhance and pluralize global public goods.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Rethinking public/private:
[starting points]
Higher education functions can be private, public or a mixture (and in part this is policy determined) Whether education is government owned is not in itself the crucial element in determining whether its outcomes are public or private. Many public institutions produce scarce and valuable private goods for individuals. And private institutions contribute to collective public goods such as an educated citizenry Our concepts of public and private should be consistent, whether we are talking in terms of national higher education or global higher education

A preferred definition of public

[adapted from political economy]
Public goods are those goods or outcomes from higher education that (1) have a significant element of non-rivalry and/or non-excludability (Samuelson 1954), and (2) are made broadly available across the population Goods are non-rivalrous when they can be consumed by any number of people without being depleted, e.g. knowledge of a mathematical theorem. Goods are nonexcludable when the benefits cannot be confined to individual buyers, e.g. law and order, or social tolerance, or the equitable distribution of social opportunities Public goods are under-produced in competitive markets

Public and private goods in higher education (examples)

Private goods include: (1) university places providing career opportunities/ status benefits confined to individuals; (2) commercial intellectual property Public goods include: (1) the production, codification and circulation of research and knowledge; (2) higher educations contribution to advanced and common social and scientific literacy; (3) univiersity contributions to the arts; (4) social values advanced by education, e.g. cosmopolitan tolerance; (5) the equitable allocation of social opportunities

Globalization
Globalization means worldwide and meta-regional convergence Globalization combines two distinctive elements: (1) the formation of integrated world markets producing private goods, operating in real time. These markets rest on (2) the first global system of communications, knowledge and culture (which are primarily state supported public goods) Contemporary globalization is also marked by accelerated and intensified cross-border mobility of people, commodity trade, and norms of policy and practice. The last includes pro-market ideologies in government and education, which reinforce (1) Global flows are transformative of practices/ identities

Globalization and higher education

Higher education is among the most globalized of sectors Higher education has a central function in the global knowledge system, and is important in communications and cultural exchange. For the most part these are, technically, public goods (though their contents are often pro-market) Higher education has a direct role in the creation of economic value but this is much less important But higher education can be configured as a quasi-economy, based predominantly on the long-standing status competition Globalization has become associated with the formation of the two-tier world-wide higher education market

Global higher education as market competition

Two tier global markets in higher education: (1) Super-league of research universities mostly USA/UK (2) Other universities providing cross-border education A fully capitalist market is found only in part of tier (2) Preconditions of market competition: (a) traditional status competition especially in research, (b) worldwide networking/ every university visible, (c) policy-driven system organization of higher education as market competition in many nations Increasingly, in many nations, global markets and the superleague overshadow the leading national universities

Top 100 research universities

2005 data from Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education
others 7 Australia 2 Netherlands 2 Switzerland 3
Others: Israel, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Russia, Italy each 1.

Sweden 4 France 4 Canada 4 Japan 5 Germany 5 UK 11 USA 53

The Super-League in 2005

from Shanghai Jiao Tong University data
1HARVARD USA 2Cambridge UK 3Stanford USA 4UC Berkeley USA 5MIT USA 6Caltech USA 7Columbia USA 8Princeton USA 9Chicago USA 10Oxford UK 11Yale USA 12Cornell USA 13UC San Diego USA 14UC Los Angeles USA 15Pennsylvania USA 16Wisconsin-Madison USA 17Washington (Seattle) USA 18UC San Francisco USA 19Johns Hopkins USA 20Tokyo Japan

Shanghai Jiao Tong University research rankings: weightings

criterion weighting

Alumni of institution: Nobel Prizes and field medals Staff of institution: Nobel Prizes and field medals High citation (HiCi) researchers Articles in Nature and Science Articles in citation indexes in science, social science, humanities Research performance (compiled as above) per head of staff total

10% 20% 20% 20% 20% 10% 100%

HiCi researchers selected universities, 2005

Stanford USA UC Berkeley USA Harvard USA MIT USA Chicago USA Illinois (Urbana) USA Cambridge UK Oxford UK Canada combined U Toronto U British Columbia Australia combined 91 81 72 72 33 33 42 29 160 26 17 95

The global market in degrees

2003 OECD data

others 20% USA 28%

Spain 3% Russ. Fed. 3% Japan 4% Australia 9% France 10% UK 12%

Germany 11%

Global public goods in higher education

Global public goods in higher education (1) have major elements of non-rivalry and/or non-excludability; (2) are made broadly available across populations; (3) affect more than one group of countries, and are broadly available within countries for example (a) common or collective goods like the research system, and recognition systems that facilitate cross-border mobility; (b) cross-border externalities, i.e. the effects of higher education in one nation on higher education in another nation

Global public goods in higher education are

Under-recognized (due to the jurisdictional gap) Under-produced in markets, and under-provided overall Global public goods are not unambiguous goods. Note that cross-border externalities are not always positive (e.g. brain drain in many nations is a global public bad). And the research system tends to occlude work in languages other than English. We must ask the question whose global public goods? Who is included in public? Who decides?

Anglo-American hegemony
[especially US hegemony]
The nations that dominate global markets in higher education also dominate global public goods (yet they under- recognize the public character of goods like research and evade the democratic responsibilities suggested by public) Global higher education markets powerfully sustain AngloAmerican hegemony. Competition pulls status, resources and people to the USA/UK, reproducing the unequal distribution of academic capacity between naitons. Competition legitimates the supremacy of American universities and models English dominates research and the US/UK lead world output The US is the world doctoral school, with half the worlds foreign doctoral students (200,000 +), many of whom stay on

Unequal global knowledge flows

number of published papers in science and social science 1993-1997: World Bank data 2000
300000

250000

200000

150000 249,386 100000

50000 53,160 58,910 61,734

310 Indonesia

5,393 Korea

11,435 China

14,883 India

18,088 Australia

33,426 Canada

Germany

Japan

UK

USA

Global competition for brains (1)

2000-2004 data, various sources, Purchasing Power Parity nation data year Professorial salary USD p.a.

USA (salary only, 9-10 months) Singapore Australia Korea (private universities only) Germany, Netherlands France, Spain, Finland Argentina

2003-04 $101,000 average 2001 $92,000-130,000 2003 $75,000 base level 2000 $71,000 average 2002-03 $60,000-70,000 2002-03 $40,000-70,000 2001 $12,000-22,000

Global competition for brains (2): doctoral students crossing borders

Percentage (%) of all foreign students who are enrolled in research degrees
OECD data for 2003 except USA 2003-2004
35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0
US doctoral universities Swizerland Sweden UK Australia

Global competition for brains (3): doctoral graduates staying in USA

OECD/US data for 2000

nation of origin of doctoral graduates (selected nations) India China UK Iran Argentina Germany Canada Australia Mexico Korea

proportion of doctoral graduates planning to stay 83% 82% 76% 67% 62% 59% 58% 46% 42% 37%

Global competition for brains (4): Clinton era globalization of US role

OECD 2002 data

Doctoral degrees in science and engineering

1985

1990

1995

all doctoral degrees doctoral degrees to foreign students foreign graduates as % of all doctoral graduates foreign graduates planning to stay in US planning to stay, as % of all foreign graduates

18113 2401 13.3% 1201 50.0%

22867 5002 21.9% 2449 49.0%

26515 7842 29.6% 5533 70.6%

Enhancing and changing global public goods in higher education

Creation of inter-governmental and multilateral spaces for negotiating recognition systems, cost-sharing, the management of cross-border externalities Specialist units in national governments responsible for monitoring and negotiating cross-border effects Involve non-government interests, market actors, universities themselves in negotiation of global goods Cultural diversity in higher education ,on the basis of equal respect, can become a primary global public good This broader spread of higher education capacity as a common global objective (rather than market competition)

Central propositions
1. Globalization combines (1) world economic markets operating in real time and producing mainly private goods with (2) the first world-wide system of communications, knowledge and culture, which are predominantly public goods; The main impact of globalization in higher education is in relation to (2), where it is central to research and culture. Yet higher education is configured by policy to support the private economy, and organized as a quasi-market competition; This downplays global public goods, reproduces global inequalities in the distribution of research capacity, and underpins Anglo-American domination in higher education.

2.

3.

thank you for the opportunity to speak with you!

simon.marginson@education.monash.edu.au http://www.education.monash.edu.au/centres/mcrie/p ublications/
after 1 July 2006 based at Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne