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In discussing the functions of education Gert Biesta distinguishes qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In subjectification higher education facilitates the evolution of students as distinctive self-determining persons. This paper foregrounds and discusses 'student self-formation', a paradigm of subjectification with fecund potentials for empirical inquiry. Self-formation emphasises reflexive agency, whereby students consciously monitor and develop themselves on an ongoing basis. The paper draws especially on Margaret Archer's discussion of reflexive agency. It argues that the core features of self-formation that are specific to higher education are engagement in disciplinary knowledge, and in activities and relations beyond the classroom that are part of student life. Student self-formation is both a norm to be achieved, with lifelong learning potentials, and a descriptor of existing practices. By its nature self-formation is never complete and its incidence is uneven among students, with some of them scarcely experiencing it. Conditions and potentials for reflexive self-formation vary on the basis of factors including the degree of immersion in higher education, the scope for agentic initiative, personal resources and support, institutional and pedagogic resources and arrangements, and existential challenges (e.g. transitions between countries and cultures) that can trigger accelerated self-reflection and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or 'all under heaven', the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Both strands have been influential through Chinese history. In the last twenty years discussion of tianxia has revived, especially through Zhao Tingyang, stimulated by globalisation and the need for practical relations beyond the nation state. This paper proposes one version of tianxia as a heuristic for understanding, rethinking and remaking ethical relations in worldwide higher education. It reviews different understandings of tianxia in China, identifies a world-centred (rather than China-centred) tianxia , and discusses the potentials of tianxia in higher education. Tianxia is appropriate to world higher education because of its spatiality and its ethical commitment to universal benefit in diverse settings on the basis of mutual respect. The article suggests four clusters of relational values that could constitute a tianxia order in higher education, and compares tianxia to existing practices of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brexit has weakened collaboration between UK higher education institutions and their EU counterparts, with negative implications for UK resources and capacity, without leading to new global strategies and opportunities. In 2020 the UK government withdrew from the Erasmus student mobility scheme and introduced the Turing scheme. While Erasmus had supported both outward UK student mobility and inward movement from Europe, Turing supports only outward mobility. In 2021–2022 the cessation of UK tuition fee arrangements for EU citizens entering UK degrees led to a sharp drop in numbers. Collaborative European research programmes have been crucial in building the infrastructure and network centrality of UK science and in attracting EU citizen researchers, but at the time of writing future UK participation as a non-member country was unresolved. The long uncertainty about this, coupled with the cessation of free people movement, have triggered the exit of some UK-based researchers and declines in UK researchers' competitiveness in European grants, EU doctoral students and established researchers entering UK, and EU country citizens as a proportion of UK academic staff. In addition, the loss of access to European structural funds has slowed the modernisation of UK higher education institutions and reduced their social contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international and global dimension of higher education continues to expand in an increasingly inter-dependent and connected world, notwithstanding geo-political tensions and conflicts. There are several different strands of research and scholarship in relation to international and global phenomena. Each has distinctive perspectives, methods, and concerns; issues that it seeks to investigate, understand, and explain; and often, policies and practices that it wants to develop and change. These strands of thought can be summarised as follows: comparative higher education, higher education and international development, post-colonial studies of higher education, global higher education studies, and studies of international education mobility. This Special Issue of Oxford Review of Education adds a further strand, one not prominent in the English-language literature but longstanding and influential in China, the perspective of thinking through the world (tianxia). Each of these strands is the starting point for one of the six articles in the Special Issue. The introduction compares the approaches taken in the six articles to matters of geo-spatiality, ethics and values, and relations of power. It also discusses how each perspective sees the other perspectives; and their respective suggestions about the future development of research and scholarship in relation to international and global higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article moves from a theorisation of the global scale in higher education and knowledge to a critical review of actual global imaginings and practices. Geo-cognitive scales such 'the global' or 'the national' are constituted by three elements: pre-given material structures, the imaginings and interpretations of agents, and the social practices of agents. Synchronous networks, time/space compression and travel have materially expanded the scope for relationality, including world-spanning systems such as science, cross-border connections, and global diffusion of ideas and models. Potentials for multi-scalar understanding and 'thinking through the world' have been enhanced. However, these imaginaries are not dominant. More prevalent are methodological globalism, in which the global displaces the national, or methodological nationalism, which blocks one-world potentials from view. In a Hobbesian global space without relational ethics, global higher education is ordered by an Anglo-American hegemony, manifest in neo-liberal economics, cultural and linguistic homogeneity, and White Supremacy in continuity with colonialism. Methodological globalism facilitates the neo-imperial claim to intervene anywhere, while methodological nationalism justifies claims to cultural superiority without obligation to engage with the other. However, no relations of power are fixed or wholly homogeneous and in global higher education there is continuing potential for multiple positionality, mutual respect and unity-in-diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledge flows and collegial collaboration and has partial autonomy. Four different interpretive frameworks (narratives) have evolved to explain global science: science as an expanding cross-border network; science as an arms race between competing nations; science as a global market of competing 'World-Class Universities'; and science as a centre-periphery hierarchy in which emerging countries are permanently constrained by Euro-American dominance. The paper reviews each narrative in relation to the literature, especially in scientometrics, and empirical tendencies in global science, tracked in secondary data derived from bibliometric collections. While each narrative contains at least a grain of truth, each also conflicts with the others and each is radically insufficient. A better explanation of the drivers of global science combines (1) flat open networked relations with (2) the inequalities and closures shaped by global hegemony, arbitrarily modified by (3) national governments and specific resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last three decades, a networked global system has emerged in the natural-science-based disciplines, sustained by collegial epistemic relations in universities. Nationally ordered and funded science has expanded alongside the global science system. The common global pool of papers, defined by bibliometric collections, nevertheless excludes large components of knowledge. In the global system, four tendencies are apparent: (1) rapid growth of papers, (2) diversification of scientific capacity to many more countries, (3) expansion of networked international and national collaboration as measured by co-authorship, (4) growing multi-polarity of capacity, outputs and quality, with the rise of China and several middle-sized national systems outside the Euro-American bloc. The paper critiques the interpretation of global science dominant in scientometrics, in which positivist data analyses are applied to performative national comparisons. It argues for a historical-synthetic explanation of the global system that combines data and theorisation, and accounts for relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of 'public good' and 'public goods' and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures ('traditions'), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the critical function, higher education in civil society, and global tianxia and global common good. A key issue in symmetrical cross-cultural comparison is the position from which it is made; and as well as elucidating similarities and differences the paper develops what Sen calls a 'trans-positional' view based on integrating the two positional views. The two traditions are not closely aligned. However, aside for the Anglo-American public/private dualism in economics (which occludes collective outcomes), all ideas in both traditions can contribute to transpositional understanding of the individualised and collective outcomes of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic in the United States and United Kingdom (unlike East Asia and parts of Europe), high individualisation and low social responsibility have been associated with an exceptional death toll, the undermining of higher education institutions in marketised systems, and continuing risks to the health of students and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines graduate outcomes. However, human capital theory fails the test of realism, due to weaknesses of method: use of a single theoretical lens and closed system modelling, inappropriate application of mathematical tools, and multi-variate analysis of interdependent variables. Human capital theory imposes a single linear pathway on the complex passage between heterogeneous education and work. It cannot explain how education augments productivity, or why salaries have become more unequal, or the role of status. These limitations are discussed with reference to research on social stratification, work, earnings and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines graduate outcomes. However, human capital theory fails the test of realism, due to weaknesses of method: use of a single theoretical lens and closed system modelling, inappropriate application of mathematical tools, and multi-variate analysis of interdependent variables. Human capital theory imposes a single linear pathway on the complex passage between heterogeneous education and work. It cannot explain how education augments productivity, or why salaries have become more unequal, or the role of status. These limitations are discussed with reference to research on social stratification, work, earnings and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on 'public'. In neo-classical economic theory, Samuelson distinguishes non-market goods (public) that cannot be produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods, or normative elements. In political theory 'public' is often understood as state ownership and/or control. Dewey regards social transactions as 'public' when they have relational consequences for persons other than those directly engaged, and so become matters of state concern. This is more inclusive than Samuelson but without limit on costs. Neither definition is wholly satisfactory, each offers something, and each can be used to critically interrogate the other. The article synthesises the two approaches, applying the resulting analytical framework with four quadrants (civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market and commercial market) to higher education and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the social-educational theorization of the early Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (1896–1934) in the light of the impact of communicative globalization in educational practice. Vygotsky proposed four “genetic domains” for investigating higher cognitive processes: the phylogenetic (humans undergoing natural evolution), the cultural-historical (social activity of humans), the ontogenetic (individual lifespan), and the microgenetic (immediate events). Vygotskian sociocultural theory is widely used in educational research, especially Vygotsky’s notion of mediated development via tools and signs. Since Vygotsky, communicative globalization has transformed educational potentials. Nevertheless, provided adjustments are made to Vygotsky’s genetic method to incorporate time-space compression, the mutual presence of the genetic domains, and the glonacal heuristic, Vygotskian theory continues to be useful in socially-situated investigations of educational development and transformation, and opens another way into the global, for example investigation of the role of global mediation in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is rapidly becoming more educated at higher education level. In nearly all countries with per capita GDP of more than about $5,000 per annum there is a longterm tendency to growth of participation. The worldwide Gross Tertiary Enrollment Ratio (GTER) increased from 10% in 1972 to 32% in 2012, and is now rising by 1% a year. By 2012 the GTER had reached 50% in 54 national systems, compared to 5 systems twenty years before, and there were 14 countries with a GTER of 75% or more. The tendency to high participation systems (HPS) is common to countries that vary widely in rates of economic growth, education system structures, and financing arrangements, but share the tendency to urbanization. Possible causes include state policies, economic development, aspirations for social position, credentialism, global factors, and combinations of these. The paper describes the tendency to HPS, explores the possible explanations, and begins to reflect on the implications; on the way reviewing prior discussions of growth in participation including Trow (1974), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Baker (2011). It closes with suggestions for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the performance of national higher education systems in 48 countries as measured with 20 variables grouped under the four headings of Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. Rankings within each module are then combined into an overall ranking that is topped by the United States followed by Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark. Relationships between different attributes are explored. Countries ranked highest on output tend to be ranked highly on resources. Research output is correlated with government funding, especially expenditure on research and development (R&D). The impact of the policy and regulatory environment is also examined. The weakest national systems are those with low government funding but high government control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky saw mental and cultural development as ‘mediated’ by artefacts, including tools and signs. He used his ‘genetic method’ to investigate higher cognitive processes in historical context. These insights are foundational to sociocultural theory, which is widely used in education research. However, since Vygotsky, communicative globalization has changed the conditions of theorization, research, policy and practice. Global convergence is characterized by extensive and intensive flows of people, messages, knowledge, ideas and money, and sudden, multiple and disjunctive changes. Educational activity is ‘glonacal’ activity, shaped simultaneously in global, national and local spheres. This article argues that nevertheless, once developed to incorporate global phenomena into the genetic method and the notion of mediating artefacts, Vygotsky's ideas have much to offer the analysis of globally affected educational practices. This conceptual approach combines the spatial insights of globalization theory with the socio-historical relational understandings enabled by the genetic method. It is illustrated by a case study on the learning to teach English practices of a cohort of Vietnamese pre-service teachers during their practicum. Global flows, media and artefacts, which are used extensively by these teachers, articulate with national and local practices and conventions in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocative efficiency or the commodity form. There is commercial tuition only in parts of vocational training and international education. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not very important. At the most, there are regulated quasi-markets, as in post-Browne UK. This differs from the experience of privatisation and commercialisation of transport, communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. The article argues that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (public goods, status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that market reform is utopian, and the abstract ideal is sustained for exogenous policy reasons (e.g. fiscal reduction, state control, ordering of contents). But, if capitalist markets are clearly unachievable, a more authentic modernisation agenda is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Strategies to enhance socio-economic equity in higher education embody one or both of two objectives. The first strategy is to advance 'fairness' by changing the composition of participation, bringing higher education into line with the ideal model of a socially representative system. The second strategy advances 'inclusion' by broadening the access and completion of under-represented groups. Governments often focus on both objectives. For example current Australian policy mentions both objectives while giving priority to fairness. But as Amartya Sen notes, the two approaches embody heterogeneous traditions of social justice. They also have diverging implications for freedom, and for social status in education (the 'elephant in the room'). The utopian fairness approach emphasises the proper functioning of institutions. The realist inclusion approach emphasises the agency of those excluded. OECD country experience suggests that while measures of fairness provide useful information, a programmatic focus on enhanced inclusion is both more achievable and more fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student security is a composite social practice that includes the domains of consumer rights, entitlement to a range of welfare supports and pastoral care, and freedom from exploitation and discrimination. Three traditions shape the systems used for managing and regulating international student security in the nations that export education: pastoral care, consumer protection and quasi-citizenship. Each has different implications for the positioning of students as agents. This study used semi-structured interviews with 70 international students from nine countries in two contrasting universities. It investigated the provision of international student security, including the distinctive New Zealand regime of security, regulated by the National Code of Practice for the Pastoral Care of International Students. This Code binds provider institutions and the International Education Appeal Authority, and permits Code-based claims by students from providers. The study found that international students in New Zealand have varying expectations of student security, which draws eclectically from all three traditions. There are gaps in the coverage of pastoral care, including the areas of financial matters and intercultural relations. Where the Code does provide protection, its provisions are not always fully implemented, such as for accommodation assistance. More seriously, there is little knowledge among students of the Code of Practice and their Code-based entitlements, and almost no knowledge of the Appeal Authority. Numerous students testified to poor information flow. This limits not only their capacities as quasi-consumers and their access to pastoral services - so that in practice, the New Zealand system is similar to the Australian system, which is explicitly limited to consumer protection - but even their ability to fully utilize consumer protection. This defect renders the promise of a regulated pastoral care regime grounded in active student agency largely inoperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period immediately preceding the 2007 Australian election, much attention was accorded to the impact of the nation's labour laws on vulnerable employees. This debate centred on specific groups including women, youth, migrants and workers on individual employment contracts. International students, by contrast, were ignored in the debate. This omission reflects the fact that though three million students study outside their home country, this community has not previously made an appearance in the labour studies literature. In this paper, we address this omission by depicting the work experience of 200 international students studying in Australian higher education institutions. We argue that a much greater proportion of international students participate in the labour market than earlier research has indicated and that in many cases they are compelled to accept very poor conditions of employment. Furthermore, we suggest that as major sponsors of international student visas, universities should inform and protect students' labour rights and that given the dire situation of many they must become a recognised part of the vulnerable-worker debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and 'scapes'. The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research interrogates the connections between information and communication technologies' (ICTs') use and change processes in Australian higher education. The empirical investigation focuses simultaneously on three domains of practice: the educational, the technological and the organizational, with a particular interest in their overlaps and intersections. There were 15 case studies, covering three discipline clusters (Medicine/Health Sciences, Economics and Business, English/Cultural Studies/Communications) in each of five different types of Australian university. The main research technique was semi-structured interviews with academic, executive and administrative staff, supplemented by focus groups with students and the study of curriculum and strategy documents. The main findings of the study were that the most effective use of ICTs in universities occurs when educational and organizational objectives are in harmony; when ICTs innovations are dominated by corporatist objectives at the expense of pedagogical objectives, benefits are limited and tensions evident; and pedagogical initiatives by discipline-based ICTs 'champions' require central support if they are to add value on a sustained basis. The optimal conditions for ICTs innovations in teaching and learning are disciplinary independence and capacity, conditions present in only one of the 15 case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global university rankings have arrived, and though still in a process of rapid evolution, they are likely to substantially influence the long-term development of higher education across the world. The inclusions, definitions, methods, implications and effects are of great importance. This paper analyses and critiques the two principal rankings systems prepared so far, the research rankings prepared by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings from the Times Higher Education Supplement. It goes on to discuss the divergence between them in the performance of Australian universities, draws attention to the policy implications of rankings, and canvasses the methodological difficulties and problems. It concludes by advocating the system of university comparisons developed by the Centre for Higher Educational Development (CHE) in Germany. This evades most of the problems and perverse effects of the other rankings systems, particularly reputational and whole-of-institution rankings. It provides data more directly useful to and controlled by prospective students, and more relevant to teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reflects on the implications of two influential albeit contrary movements affecting research universities in Australia (and many other nations): global rankings, which normalize the comprehensive science-based research university; and the policy emphasis on diversification. It critiques the global rankings developed by the Times Higher Education Supplement and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which tend to shift control over the definition and purpose of university activity to the rankings agencies themselves. Taken together, rankings and diversity pose for university executives and governing bodies the question of university mission and strategy. It is knowledge creation that distinguishes universities. To go to the root of mission and strategy is to revisit the academic fundamentals, focusing on the mixed public/private character of the core academic ‘products’ of universities and on the internal ethical regimes essential to sustain free scholarship and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically reviews the concept of ‘global flows’, beginning with the discussions of flows and networks in Appadurai (1996), Castells (2000) and Held et al . (1999). Emphasising the need to embed ‘global flows’ in agency and history, and to explore global connectedness in terms of situated cases, the paper develops an analytical framework for analysing global flows in higher education. It then applies that framework in an examination of global ‘scapes’, impacts, transformations, situatedness and relations of power in two national universities, research leaders in their nations but located in contrasting nations: Universitas Indnesia and the Australian National University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the rise of international education in Australia. Role of policy, management and circumstances in the success of international education; List of universities that have international education in their programs; Structure of financial incentives.

Focuses on factors affecting the restructuring process in higher education in Australia. Ambivalence in relation to globalization; Withdrawal of government support for the nation-building role of universities; Conflict between academic and corporate values; Academic impact of the weakening identity and cultures of the academic profession.

Globalization refers to the formation of world systems, as distinct from internationalization which presupposes nations as the essential unit. Globalization includes finance and trade; communications and information technologies; migration and tourism; global societies; linguistic, cultural and ideological convergence; and world systems of signs and images. While it does not negate the nation-state, it changes its circumstances and potentials. In the global era, government continues to be largely national in form, and education is, if anything, more central to government, while issues of identity and difference become more important in the politics of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the changes in student financing in higher education in Australia as of June 1997. Political economy's impact on student financing policies; Liberal government and education; Trends in student financing in Australia; Higher Education Contribution Scheme; Extension of individualized charges.

*Prepared for the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies Conference, Griffith University, 1-4 December 1988. Thanks to Lesley Johnson, Michael Bartos, Ralph Hall, Di Zetlin, Simon During, Graham McCulloch, and especially Gary Wickham for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Provides an overview of articles on curriculum changes in higher education in Australia. Factors affecting the performance of university restructuring; Accounts on the early implementation of the Colombo Plan, the postwar aid-based scheme that became the foundation of international Australian education; Obstacles in university collaboration.