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In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector's contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England after nearly a decade of full marketisation. The study, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries, consisted of a review of major policy reports, and 24 semi-structured interviews in universities (13) and among higher education policy professionals (11) including regulators, national organisations and experts. England has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than attenuated performative outputs such as graduate salaries, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation, understood as individual access to education as a private good. Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the imposition of a market in the centralised English system. This has coincided with a shift from direct government funding and collaborative stewardship by state and institutions, to student funding and top-down regulation. Nevertheless, most interviewees, including regulators, advocated an open-ended public good role and provided many examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum relation of private and public outcomes, corresponding to the split of private/public costs, was rejected in favour of a positive-sum relation of private and public outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

International higher education branch campuses (IBCs) in China and elsewhere possess dual identity. There are stakeholders on both the home and host sides. While international branch campuses receive scholarly attention, there has been little study of their research and the role of institutional dual identity in research capacity building. This paper develops a conceptual framework that brings the conditions, practices, and outcomes of research together with dual institutional identity, to study research capacity building at NYU Shanghai. Data from 16 semi-structured interviews with academics, administrators, and university leaders indicate that institutional dual identity is central to what the institution has achieved in building research, influencing every aspect of the process. NYU Shanghai's American identity has shaped academic practices and workloads, and NYU's multi-site structure provides significant networks and resources, yet the institution has also adapted to its Chinese identity and local stakeholders. Dual identity has generated policy conflicts and logistical hurdles yet has also opened institutional and academic opportunities unavailable to other US institutions. While every IBC is embedded in a complex and partly unique context, this study suggests a reflexive understanding of research capacity building in such settings, and contributes to empirical knowledge of cross-border institutions, especially in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses how UK universities seek to maintain their global dominant position post-Brexit through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key European institutions as part of their internationalisation strategies. Drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews conducted from November 2017 to July 2018 in 12 UK universities vertically differentiated and spread along the highly hierarchised spectrum of British universities in all four nations, we aim to examine which types of universities are most inclined to form international comprehensive university-wide strategic partnerships, and how they identify their partners. The analysis is framed within Bourdieu's theory of "economy of practices" which considers all university practices as economic practices that are ultimately tailored towards maximising either material or symbolic profit. Unlike in business and industry, where organisations traditionally compete to maximise profit, universities must both compete and collaborate with one another in order to improve (or maintain) their position in the field. UK universities will need to navigate the post-Brexit space they find themselves thrown into, and in the process will need to review international institutional links with both European Union (EU) based and non-EU universities. This paper will assess how UK universities seek to maintain their dominant position in the field through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key foreign institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, publishing, and cross-border papers, is expanding rapidly and spreading to a growing number of countries. Strong national science systems have emerged outside Euro-America. Yet the multipolarization of economic capacity and scientific output plays out within a continuing Euro-American science world regulated by an inside/outside binary. Global science remains primarily Anglo-American in language, leading institutions, disciplinary and publishing regimes, agendas, and topics. Non-English and endogenous knowledges are excluded. The article critiques the world-systems theory interpretation of relations of power in science. The determinist center-periphery model fails to grasp the growth and pluralization of global science and its relation with national science systems. It normalizes the Eurocentrism it opposes, radically underestimating agency outside the "center" countries. The article argues for a more ontologically open theorization of global power in science, in terms of cultural hegemony, and for an ecology-of-knowledges approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism—influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life. [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]

Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China's science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear. [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]

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]

In the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, California in the United States famously combined the principles of excellence and access within a steep three-tiered system of Higher Education. It fashioned the world's strongest system of public research universities, while creating an open access system that brought college to millions of American families for the first time. Since 1960, the Master Plan has been admired and influential across the world. Yet the political and fiscal conditions supporting the Master Plan have now evaporated. California turns away hundreds of thousands of prospective students each year, and the University of California, facing spiralling deficits, finds it more difficult to maintain operating costs and compete with top private universities for leading researchers. The paper discusses the rise and partial fall of the Californian system as embodied in the Master Plan, and identifies general lessons for Higher Education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 40 years, UK higher education has moved from a publicly funded system to a mixed publicly/privately funded system regulated as a tuition loans-based consumer market, in which both the student as graduate, and the higher education institution, are responsible for a significant proportion of total costs. It is nevertheless subject to robust government control. This is partly exercised indirectly through comparative assessments of institutional performance by public agencies that define common objectives and install a hierarchy based on measured performance, helping to differentiate HEIs within the market. Institutions remain partly dependent on government funding in the forms of research-related support, teaching subsidies and subsidization of the loan system through non-repayment of debt. The 2012 introduction of a £9000 maximum fee for full-time students and £6750 for part-time students in England, based on income-contingent repayment arrangements, was associated with a net increase in funding, growth in full-time first degree students, and a sharp fall in part-time and mature age students. Part-time students begin repayments four years after the commencement of their course of study. The long-term cost of the student loans scheme is uncertain and its sustainability is in question. After 15 years of declining funding for students, total systemic funding rose by 50% between 2000 and 2015 and per student funding also rose, mainly benefiting the research-intensive universities in the Russell group. These universities benefit most from funds allocated through the government’s periodic national research assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions. The quality of mass higher education is often problematic. Societies vary in the extent of upward social mobility from low-socio-economic-status backgrounds. The paper explores the intersection between stratified social backgrounds and the stratifying structures in HPS. These differentiating structures include public/private distinctions in schooling and higher education, different fields of study, binary systems and tiered hierarchies of institutions, the vertical 'stretching' of stratification in competitive HPS, and the unequalising effects of tuition. Larger social inequalities set limits on what education can achieve. Countries with high mobility sustain a consensus about social equality, and value rigorous and autonomous systems of learning, assessment and selection in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including educational quality; strategic planning; and higher education research.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the higher education system in Great Britain, the transnational education, and the transformation from public goods to private goods in higher education.

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]

Regional tendencies in higher education are increasingly important, for example the common rise of North-East Asian universities in China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan and South Korea, and Singapore in South-East Asia, to a major global role, following the prior trajectory of Japan. Though the rapidly modernizing Post-Confucian countries do not constitute a formal region, they share a common political and cultural dynamism, entailing rapid improvement of quantity and quality in education and research. This poses challenges and opportunities for Australia, a British/European heritage nation located at the edge of Asia, with extensive trade into East Asia, and an Asian-influenced demography, providing that it can (1) further develop its research capacity, given that research provides the main medium of deep collaboration in higher education, and (2) lift its cultural capacity to interface with systems in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University rankings widely affect the behaviours of prospective students and their families, university executive leaders, academic faculty, governments and investors in higher education. Yet the social science foundations of global rankings receive little scrutiny. Rankings that simply recycle reputation without any necessary connection to real outputs are of no common value. It is necessary that rankings be soundly based in scientific terms if a virtuous relationship between performance and ranking is to be established, the worst potentials of rankings are to be constrained, and rankings are optimised as a source of comparative information. This article evaluates six ranking systems, Shanghai ARWU, Leiden University, QS, Scopus, Times Higher Education and U- Multirank, according to six social science criteria and two behavioural criteria. The social science criteria are materiality (rankings must be grounded in the observable higher education world), objectivity (opinion surveys should not be used), externality (ranked universities should not be a source of data about themselves), comprehensiveness (rankings should cover the broadest possible range of functions), particularity (ranking systems should eschew multi-indicators with weights, or proxy measures) and ordinal proportionality (vertical distinctions between universities should not be exaggerated). The behavioural criteria are the alignment of the ranking with tendencies to improved performance of all institutions and countries, and transparency, meaning accessibility to strategy making designed to maximize institutional position. The pure research rankings rate well overall but lack comprehensiveness. U- Multirank is also strong under most criteria but stymied by its 100 per cent reliance on subjective data collected via survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In research in cross-cultural psychology, international education is largely understood as an “adjustment” to host country norms and institutions, a notion that prioritizes social order and stability. The student is seen as in deficit in relation to these norms. The student’s home country identity becomes seen as a barrier to be broken down. In contrast, this article sees higher education, and within that international education, as a process of self-formation within conditions of disequilibrium in which student subjects manage their lives reflexively, fashioning their own changing identities, albeit under social circumstances largely beyond their control. International students form their self-trajectories somewhere between home country identity (which continues to evolve in the country of education), host country identity, and a larger set of cosmopolitan options. In piloting their pathways they draw on multiple identities and fashion new forms of hybrid identity. The article highlights the need for international education programs to strengthen the agency freedom of students, and its scope and resources, to facilitate this educational process of self-formation. [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]

The article focuses on the international student welfare regulation in Australia. Topics discussed include the worldwide growth of the education market in Australia, the human rights of international students, and the Education Services for Overseas Students Framework. Also mentioned are the re-conceiving of International Students as Trans-National Citizenship subjects, student welfare, and the National Code.

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]

The article examines the regulation of international student welfare in Australia within the framework of the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) in the wake of violent attacks on foreign students in Melbourne and Sydney. According to the article, within the ESOS, maximisation of global market share is prioritised over the welfare of the market subject. It proposes to reform the ESOS to deal more effectively with student services and rights considerations.

“International student security” refers to the international student’s maintenance of a stable capacity for self-determining human agency. The article focuses on the role of English-language proficiency in the security of students from English as Foreign Language countries, drawing on evidence from a program of semistructured interviews with 200 international students. The interviews show that language proficiency is a pervasive factor in the human security of the international students in all domains inside and outside the classroom. There is a strong link between language proficiency and the capacity for active human agency. Both findings confirm prior research literature. The article concludes with implications for practice and for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the 50th anniversary special issue of Higher Education recounts the history of the journal and reflects on the evolution and expansion of the journal and the field. Higher education studies is an object-oriented field that combines academic explanations with practical interventions. The journal takes an agnostic approach to disciplinary frameworks, theories, and methodologies and an eclectic and inclusive approach to topics. It began in 1972 with a preoccupation with the nature and implications of mass higher education systems, including internationally comparative analyses, and with a focus on policy and planning. Most of the earlier themes of research in the field have continued to the present, but as mass higher education systems have spread across the world, so has the journal's author list and editorial group. Higher education studies remain biased to the Anglophone and Euro-American worlds in their topics, theorizations, and author lists. Between 1996 and 2018, the USA and other English-speaking countries accounted for about 70% of authorship in the six journals with the highest impact factor. However, in Higher Education, that proportion was just over 45%, indicating some progress in the journal's efforts to pluralize, partly through the growth of papers from China. The introduction looks forward, anticipating growth in contributions from the global South, and further inquiry into the purposes of higher education and into its relations in social context. Finally, the introduction discusses the 50th anniversary papers that follow, contributed by twelve present and past editors of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's three million cross-border international students are located in a 'gray zone' of regulation with incomplete human rights, security and capabilities. Like other mobile persons such as short-term business and labour entrants, and refugees, students located on foreign soil do not enjoy the same protections and entitlements as do citizens. International students are affected by two different national regulatory regimes, in the nations of citizenship and of education. But they are fully covered by neither. Their position is vulnerable and uncertain, mediated by non-citizen status and the related facts of cultural difference, information asymmetry and communication difficulties. Referring to research on international education in Australia, which has the world's fifth largest international student population, the article focuses on the manner in which the subordinated outsider status of international students magnifies the problems they face. It considers what might be done to enable them to access comprehensive protections, empowerment and human rights as defined in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy debate about whether to maintain public subsidies for higher education has stimulated reconsideration of the public mission of higher education institutions, especially those that provide student places conferring private benefits. If the work of higher education institutions is defined simply as the aggregation of private interests, this evaporates the rationale for higher education institutions as distinctive social foundations with multiple public and private roles. The private benefits could be produced elsewhere. If that is all there is to higher education institutions, they could follow the Tudor monasteries into oblivion. But what is 'public' in higher education institutions? What could be 'public'? What should be 'public'? The paper reviews the main notions of 'public' (public goods in economics, public understood as collective good and Habermas' public sphere) noting the contested and politicised environment in which notions of 'public' must find purchase. A turn to global public goods offers the most promising strategy for re-grounding the 'public' character of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the 'Confucian' education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism-still playing out everywhere except Japan-and have created a distinctive model of higher education more effective in some respects than systems in North America, the English-speaking world and Europe where the modern university was incubated. The Confucian Model rests on four interdependent elements: (1) strong nation-state shaping of structures, funding and priorities; (2) a tendency to universal tertiary participation, partly financed by growing levels of household funding of tuition, sustained by a private duty, grounded in Confucian values, to invest in education; (3) 'one chance' national examinations that mediate social competition and university hierarchy and focus family commitments to education; (4) accelerated public investment in research and 'world-class' universities. The Model has downsides for social equity in participation, and in the potential for state interference in executive autonomy and academic creativity. But together with economic growth amid low tax regimes, the Confucian Model enables these systems to move forward rapidly and simultaneously in relation to each and all of mass tertiary participation, university quality, and research quantity and quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The fecund growth of open source knowledge goods in the global communicative environment underlines their public good character. Once knowledge goods are disseminated, their cost and price tend towards zero. It is now obvious (as apparent in recent OECD policy documents) that commercial research and trade in intellectual property capture only a small fraction of open source knowledge, which is expanding even more rapidly than global markets. But for policy makers this poses the problem of how to assign stable and defensible value to free floating knowledge goods. Across the world, research universities have been positioned in a networked competition of institutions with globally mobile personnel and converging goals and organizational cultures. In rapid time global university ranking and the associated technologies of publication and citation ordering and counting have proved potent in arranging status, assigning value and shaping behaviours in higher education. We find that public goods are readily annexed to the longer-standing projects of producing university status and sustaining an imperial global geo-politics of knowledge. Here the relation between status production and free open source cultural production is not so much a contradiction as an antinomy. These issues are discussed in the light of the flourishing and fall of the lowland city-states of the Maya in Mesoamerica, a notable example of a status economy and of the interplay between status reproduction and cultural goods, a dynamic only partly nested in economic production. The article reviews the rankings technologies, led by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University research metrics, the global strategies of university executives, changing national policies on universities and research, and the aggregation of these effects in the emerging 'arms race' in investment in innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various reports published within the issue, including "Education, Creativity, and the Economy of Passions: New Forms of Educational Capitalism," by Michael Peters, "Innovation and Creativity: Beyond Diffusion -- On Ordered (Thus Determinable) Action and Organization," by Anders Michelsen, and "The Act of Collaborative Creation and the Art of Integrative Creativity: Originality, Disciplinarity, and Interdisciplinarity," by Diana Rhoten, Erin O'Connor, and Edward Hackett.

In the last two decades the techniques of the new public management (NPM) have become widely employed in universities throughout the world, especially but not only in the English-speaking nations, as the template for management of organizational units and of academic labour. The NPM originated in the methods of government and public administration developed by the successive Thatcher governments in the UK in the 1980s. The foundations lay in the neo-liberal political philosophy of F.A. Hayek. The paper develops a critique of the NPM and its effects on universities, in two stages. First it analyses the forms of freedom produced by Hayekian liberalism. Drawing on Amartya's Sen's account of three aspects of freedom (agency freedom, freedom as control or 'negative freedom', freedom as effective freedom or positive freedom) the paper argues that Hayek focuses largely on freedom as control and this produces a specific account of the scope for activity of intellectuals and institutions. Second, the paper investigates at the various techniques developed as part of the NPM, from market style devolution and competition to accountability and audit regarding 'quality', in terms of their effects in forms of freedom, and particularly the limitations created by an undue focus on freedom as control at the expense of a larger set of human potentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Simon Marginson focuses on self-determining academic freedom in universities, and especially the conditions and drivers of the radical-creative imagination that is manifest in sudden intellectual breaks in knowledge. Marginson’s objective is to establish foundations in political philosophy for a sociological study of the effects of the new public management (NPM) on academic self-determination and radical creativity. After discussing the radical-creative imagination, Marginson identifies the core elements of academic self-determination as agency freedom, freedom as power, and freedom as control. He then annotates each of the particular administrative and financial practices fostered by NPM in the light of these constituents of freedom, explores the implications for the radical-creative imagination, and identifies possible lines of empirical inquiry for further sociological study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a study of international student security, consisting of 200 intensive interviews with students, resident onshore in Australia, it was found that two thirds of the group had experienced problems of loneliness and/or isolation, especially in the early months. According to Weiss, students experience both personal loneliness because of the loss of contact with families and social loneliness because of the loss of networks. Both forms of loneliness are at times exacerbated by their experiences in institutional sites. The article discusses the coping mechanisms that students use. It identifies a third kind of loneliness experienced by international students, cultural loneliness, triggered by the absence of the preferred cultural and/or linguistic environment. This can affect even students with adequate personal and social support. Thus, same-culture networks are often crucial for international students. Yet same-culture networks are not a universal panacea: They cannot substitute for adequate pastoral care by universities or ensure satisfactory engagement with local cultures, so some causes of cultural loneliness often remain. The article concludes that the creation of stronger bonds between international and local students in the educational setting, helping international students to remake their own cultural maps on their own terms, is key to a forward move on loneliness. [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]

Our common understandings of the public/private distinction in higher education are drawn from neo-classical economics and/or statist political philosophy. However, the development of competition and markets at the national level, and the new potentials for private and public goods created by globalisation in higher education, have exposed weaknesses in the traditional notions of public/private. For example, (1) the statist notion that higher education is always/already a public good blinds us to its role in producing scarce positional private goods, even in free systems; (2) because there is no global state, both statists and neo-liberals model the global higher education environment simply as a trading environment without grasping the potential for global public goods in education – goods that are subject to non-rivalry or non-excludability, and broadly available across populations, on a global scale. Yet higher education in one nation has the potential to create positive and negative externalities in another; and all higher education systems and institutions can benefit from collective systems e.g. that facilitate cross-border recognition and mobility. The paper sets out to revise public/private in higher education. Rather than defining public/private in terms of legal ownership, it focuses on the social character of the goods. It argues that public/private goods are not always zero sum and under certain conditions provide conditions of possibility for each other. It proposes (a) units in national government that focus specifically on cross-border effects; (b) global policy spaces – taking in state agencies, individual universities, NGOs and commercial agents – to consider the augmentation, distribution of and payment for global public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a global environment in which global, national and local nodes relate freely within common networks, all research universities must pursue strategies for building global capacity and facilitating cross-border staff and student movement and research collaboration. The study compares readings of the global environment, global and international activities and relationships, and global capacity and strategy, in two leading national universities, one in a middle level developing country (Indonesia) and the other in a middle level developed country (Australia). The main tool of investigation was interviews with parallel groups of institutional leaders and leaders of academic units and research centres, in conjunction with study of the national and local contexts. It was apparent that in both cases, while global elements are increasingly important in university strategy, mission and identity, resource capacity remains highly dependant on national government and students. This belies the romantic myth of the ‘stand-alone’ corporate university in the global marketplace. The two cases also differ in some respects. While both universities are peak national institutions, and each respects the other, the Australian university is more strongly placed in the global environment and practical dealings between them are asymmetrical. The study helps to illuminate the dynamics of global stratification and hierarchy between developed and developing nations and institutions in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the dynamics of competition in higher education. National competition and global competition are distinct, but feed into each other. Higher education produces ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that provide access to social prestige and income-earning. Research universities aim to maximise their status as producers of positional goods. This status is a function of student selectivity plus research performance. At system-level competition bifurcates between exclusivist elite institutions that produce highly value positional goods, where demand always exceeds supply and expansion is constrained to maximise status; and mass institutions (profit and non-profit) characterised by place-filling and expansion. Intermediate universities are differentiated between these poles. In global competition, the networked open information environment has facilitated (1) the emergence of a world-wide positional market of elite US/UK universities; and (2) the rapid development of a commercial mass market led by UK and Australian universities. Global competition is vectored by research capacity. This is dominated by English language, especially US universities, contributing to the pattern of asymmetrical resources and one-way global flows. The paper uses Australia as its example of system segmentation and global/national interface. It closes by reflecting on a more balanced global distribution of capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the democratic tradition to return to a vanguard position in education requires a thorough exploration of the problems of democratization in education and an inventory of possible new forms. In this essay, Simon Marginson reviews five books concerned with democracy and education: Michael Apple’s Educating the “Right” Way, Denis Carlson’s Leaving Safe Harbors, A. Belden Fields and Walter Feinberg’s Education and Democratic Theory, Trevor Gale and Kathleen Densmore’s Engaging Teachers, and Klas Roth’s Democracy, Education and Citizenship. While these authors imagine democracy in somewhat different ways, they have a common interest in the role of public schooling in the formation of democratic agents and practices. The books do not offer a definitive account of the problems of democratization, nor do they embody a major breakthrough in democratic educational thinking, but they all provide helpful explorations of these issues. Marginson concludes with some thoughts on commodification and neoliberal economism in education, a contemporary focus of discussion in democratic educational circles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American public university is losing status vis-à-vis the Ivy League private sector. In mass education it is challenged by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Declining state financing is symptomatic of the evacuation of public values inside and outside the university. This has proceeded furthest in the USA. Other university systems are affected by national/local as well as global/American factors. Nevertheless, most public universities are on the defensive. Intensified status competition, locking nearly into neo-liberal government, is reconstituting the field of higher education (Bourdieu, 1988) as a competitive market in private status goods. This, not a structural transformation consequent on changes in scale, is decisive. Universities have a capacity for bounded diversity and an underutilized potential in public discourse that enables them to combine openness with research and academic excellence, but not with high student selectivity and social exclusivity. The article comments on the implications of Craig Calhoun's essay for reinventing the public university, focusing on two theorizations that provide resources for this: Samuelson (1954) on public and private goods, and Habermas (1989) on the public sphere. However, neither fully encompasses the university's role in learning, scholarship, identity formation and self-alteration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]