AHELO – key words

Source: AHELO slideshow (see below) as translated by Wordle

OECD launches first global assessment of higher education learning outcomes

Editor’s note: the slideshow below about the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative, and the associated press release, were kindly provided to GlobalHigherEd by Richard Yelland, Head of the Education Management and Infrastructure Division (Directorate for Education), OECD. Coverage of the AHELO launch yesterday, at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s 2010 Annual Conference (January 25-28, Washington, D.C.), was evident in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education (‘OECD Project Seeks International Measures for Assessing Educational Quality‘), Inside Higher Ed (‘Measuring Student Learning, Globally‘) and Lloyd Armstrong’s weblog Changing Higher Education.

Today’s guest entry (via slideshow) in GlobalHigherEd is designed to shed light on the nature of AHELO, an initiative that reflects the OECD’s ‘collective learning machinery’ role; a role that numerous stakeholders (e.g., state and provincial governments; non-profit foundations, ministries) link into in a myriad of ways. AHELO is emerging at an historical moment when the clamoring for a better understanding of learning outcomes, and associated processes of quality assurance, is evident around the world. In this context it is important to understand what AHELO is, as perceived by the OECD itself, but also why select agencies and institutions (e.g., the US-based ones noted in the press release) value the OECD’s work.

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OECD launches first global assessment of higher education learning outcomes

1/27/2010

The OECD today announced the launch of the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. The AHELO generic assessment component will look at skills such as problem solving and critical thinking. A US$1.2 million contract has been awarded to the Council for Aid to Education based in New York City to develop an international version of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).

Speaking at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation conference in Washington, DC, Richard Yelland, who is leading the OECD’s AHELO initiative said: “AHELO is a pioneering international attempt to assess the quality of higher education by focussing on what students have learned during their studies and what skills they have acquired. Success will provide higher education systems and institutions with diagnostic tools for improvement that go far beyond anything currently available”.

This ground-breaking project aims to demonstrate that reliable and useful comparisons of learning outcomes can be made on a global scale and will point the way for future improvements.

Welcoming this announcement, US Under-Secretary for Education, Martha Kanter, said: “We appreciate OECD’s leadership to assess student performance on an international scale. The AHELO initiative provides the US with an exciting opportunity to collaborate with other countries to assess higher education learning outcomes in our global society.”

Council for Aid to Education  (CAE)  President Roger Benjamin commented: “Because of its success in important international assessments, the OECD is the right venue for creating AHELO and its generic strand which will focus on the skills thought to be critical for human capital development and citizenship in the 21^st century. We are pleased that the CLA has been chosen for this purpose.

Funding for this work comes from participating countries and from the Lumina Foundation for Education which has made a USD750 000 grant to the OECD.

“With Lumina’s investments focused heavily on increasing the number and quality of postsecondary degrees and  credentials, the work of AHELO is essential and will help to ensure that these credentials are learning outcome-based and relevant in the United States as well as internationally,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive officer of Lumina Foundation.

Other components of AHELO will measure student knowledge in two discipline areas – economics and engineering. Contextual analysis will factor in student background and national differences. In time a value-added strand will look at learning gains over time.

Higher education is an increasingly strategic investment for countries and for individuals. It is estimated that some 135 million students study worldwide in more than 17 000 universities and other institutions of post-secondary education.

At least thirteen culturally diverse countries across the globe are joining the US as participants in this groundbreaking project, including Finland, Italy, Mexico, Japan, and Kuwait. AHELO will test a sample of students in a cross-section of institutions in each country. Institutions in four states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania) will be working together, and with the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) association to participate on behalf of the United States.

SHEEO President Paul Lingenfelter said: “This is a real opportunity for institutions in the four states to engage in improving knowledge and practice with respect to college learning outcomes. U.S participation is essential, and we will all benefit from their efforts.”

For information, journalists are invited to contact: Susan Fridy(202) 822-3869 at the OECD Washington Center, or Angela Howard at OECD in Paris +33 1 45 24 80 99. For more information on the AHELO, go to: www.oecd.org/edu/ahelo.

TUNING USA: Echoes and translations of the Bologna Process in the US higher education landscape

As noted in two earlier GlobalHigherEd entries (‘Bologna: beyond 2010 and over the Ocean – but where to? On new Bologna reports and C. Adelman’s last essay‘ by Pavel Zgaga; ‘Tuning USA’: reforming higher education in the US, Europe style‘ by Susan Robertson) the US-based Lumina Foundation is sponsoring an action-oriented project (TUNING USA) on the relevancy of Europe’s Tuning process for the US higher education system. Lumina is working in association with the states of Indiana, Minnesota, and Utah.

As noted on the key Tuning website (run by Bologna Process follow-up group members at Universidad de Deusto and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen but sponsored by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture):

TUNING Educational Structures in Europe started in 2000 as a project to link the political objectives of the Bologna Process and at a later stage the Lisbon Strategy to the higher educational sector. Over time Tuning has developed into a Process, an approach to (re-)designing, develop, implement, evaluate and enhance quality first, second and third cycle degree programmes. The Tuning outcomes as well as its tools are presented in a range of Tuning publications, which institutions and their academics are invited to test and use in their own setting. The Tuning approach has been developed by and is meant for higher education institutions.

The protection of the rich diversity of European education has been paramount in Tuning and in no way seeks to restrict the independence of academic and subject specialists, or undermine local and national authority.

Tuning focuses not on educational systems, but on educational structures with emphasis on the subject area level, that is the content of studies. Whereas educational systems are primarily the responsibility of governments, educational structures and content are that of higher education institutions and their academic staff.

As a result of the Bologna Process the educational systems in all European countries are in the process of reforming. This is the direct effect of the political decision to converge the different national systems in Europe. For Higher Education institutions these reforms mean the actual starting point for another discussion: the comparability of curricula in terms of structures, programmes and actual teaching. This is what Tuning offers. In this reform process the required academic and professional profiles and needs of society (should) play an important role.

The Tuning process is a fascinating lens through which to examine multiple dimensions of global regionalisms (including interregionalism) and the transformation of higher education. It is through ‘echoes’ like TUNING USA that the process unfolds in all its complexity. One component of this is the translation process, with new translations of the Tuning process emerging (e.g., see Anne Corbett’s take on this in ‘A European view of the new Adelman report on the Bologna Process‘). As Corbett notes, and as is evident in European policy debates, these translations feed back across the Atlantic to key centres of calculation (especially Brussels), helping to legitimize the Bologna process, while also generating ideas for its refinement. The feedback process is occurring via workshops on both sides of the Atlantic, the circulation of reports, international collaborative research projects, and also the consumption of complementary forms of communication including this illuminating 10 minute video titled Tuning: A Tale of Adventures in Learning (link to it via the title in my sentence, not the screengrab below):

In this context it is worth thinking about how the Lumina Foundation has translated Europe’s Tuning process, and how this “Indianapolis-based, private, independent foundation” is pushing forward its US-focused reform agenda through the use of Tuning, though adapted (hence the state-based pilot projects) to take into account the unique nature of the US higher education landscape.

The “echoes” noted in the Zgaga report (Looking out: The Bologna Process in a Global Setting) continue apace, making any examination of Bologna’s field of influence and relations a rather complicated yet entirely worthwhile endeavor.

Kris Olds

Is a UK funding crisis an effective mechanism to spur on the ‘education as a global growth industry’ development agenda?

Amidst a discursive struggle this week over the state of finances for higher education and research in the UK, which reached a crescendo two days ago (e.g., see ‘Universities face meltdown – and all of Britain will suffer‘; ‘Higher education will be ‘on its knees’ after cuts‘), I could not help but note what Prime Minister Gordon Brown had to say in a speech (‘Education as a global growth industry‘) on 14 January:

Today, I also set out our commitment that, working in partnership with you, and our schools, colleges and universities, we will support a major expansion of their activities across the world.  Central to this is a new ambition, which I am setting today for Britain, that we double the value of our higher-education exports.

We will do this in four ways.  We will welcome students here to Britain on the basis of merit and ability – of course with all the proper checks in place.  We are determined to stamp out abuse of student visas and I announced last year we will shortly bring forth proposals on this.  I emphasise that all students that come here legitimately, to benefit from our UK education system, will be made welcome, because we are not prepared to put legitimate language courses, and schools and colleges out of business or set back our efforts to expand our educational trade.

Secondly, we want to reinforce and build on the international standing of our qualifications, by offering examinations and qualifications that are rightly highly regarded around the world.

Thirdly, we will work to develop partnerships between UK institutions and universities in many different countries around the globe.  Already over the last four years, we have promoted thousands of new partnerships across all sectors, from schools linking to post graduate research through our initiatives for international education.  In a global knowledge economy, we know we will thrive, not just by developing our own knowledge, but by taking knowledge and sharing it with the billions of people who understand that education is the key to survival and success.

Fourthly, we will use distance learning to build on the work of our excellent universities that are already making use of great and rapid advances in the relevant technology.  As I said, in our higher-education strategy, we welcome and support the work of the group chaired by Lynne Brindley.  This task force is looking at how we can expand and develop the use of IT and online learning, not only in the UK, but across the world.  Across higher education, we will want to ensure that we maintain and enhance world-class standards in everything we do in our international activities.

This is not about chasing money; it’s about leveraging our higher education system to offer the highest-quality opportunities across the world.[my emphasis]

This argument was matched, on the same day, by Peter Mandelson (the UK’s Universities Secretary) who suggested in The Guardian (‘Our universities are not under threat. Their income is at record levels‘) that:

The Russell Group can take much credit for the world-class standard of British higher education today. But the government inherited a badly underfunded university sector in 1997, which a former Conservative education minister described as “poorer pay, degraded facilities, less money to support the teaching of each student”. This government’s agenda for universities has included more state funding than ever before – an increase of over 25% since 1997. It is against this backdrop that British universities have developed into some of the very best in the world and are a critical part of our knowledge economy.

But this wasn’t simply on the back of state funding. In fact, while government spends £12.3bn on higher education today, total university income from all sources was over £23bn in 2007-2008. Government incentives have pushed universities to seek new forms of income from donations, international students and commercial engagement with industry. These are consistently rising. The decision to introduce tuition fees in England has also provided a new source of income. [my emphasis]

Mandelson carries on to note:

It is for universities themselves to identify where savings should be found, and they are as free as ever to focus on their research excellence and institutional strengths. The search for greater efficiencies should include more part-time courses and a greater range of one- or two-year degrees.

As I discussed earlier in GlobalHigherEd (‘Learning from London‘) the export earnings logic is already putting pressure on some UK higher education institutions, such that they are being driven the create new postgraduate [graduate degree] programs that have hundreds of Masters students supported by a small coterie of faculty.  And I subsequently heard, in response to my ‘Learning from London‘ entry, that some London-based Masters programs have faculty sign contracts with students denoting exactly how many hours of “contact time” students can expect (it was a shockingly small number of hours per degree…something like 5 hours for the entire MA, assuming they follow through with the promised hours).

Now, as we also noted in ‘Taking note of export earnings‘, this global growth industry agenda is underlain by an ideological shift:

We would argue that these numbers are being constituted, and debated about, in the context of an ideological transition – one that increasingly enables views to emerge of higher education as a driver of economic versus cultural-political change. For example, a decade or two ago, it would have been impossible to imagine creating tables such as the one profiled in Kate Geddie’s entry in GlobalHigherEd in which education is measured against ‘scrap plastics’ or ‘chemical woodpulp’. Thus, a new organising logic, to use Saskia Sassen’s phrase, is emerging: one that reframes higher education as an urban/national/global services industry, for good and for bad.

Assuming we are right (of course we might not be!), it is interesting to think about how effective a state-enabled fiscal crisis for higher education institutions (in the range of a 12.5% cut so far, then 6.3% in succeeding years over three years “taking the total to about 30%”) will be in propelling this export agenda along.  To be sure there is a broader fiscal crisis in UK public finances, but can it really be ameliorated on the backs of UK universities (and students, local and foreign)? All savings via higher ed cutbacks are significant, but in the big picture they are not that significant for the overall UK budget.  But the transformation of the values shaping higher education policy, including enhanced state control versus greater autonomy for HEIs, is much more significant, more noteworthy, and certainly worth deliberating about. And the function of the crisis – a “politically mediated moment of decisive intervention and structural transformation” to use Colin Hay’s words* – is also worth unpacking.

In the end, is a UK funding crisis an effective mechanism to spur on a quality-oriented ‘education as a global growth industry’ development agenda? Will it provide a defacto or by design opening for private sector providers into the UK ‘market’, as it is doing now in the US (e.g., see Changing Higher Education’s ‘For-profit higher education moves to fill gaps left by state budget shortfalls‘)? And who gains and who loses in the process? For example, can those 16-17 faculty and 13 teaching fellows (3 with PhD) I profiled in ‘Learning from London‘ take on even more that the “almost 400” masters students they already have to cope with, support, mentor, and educate?  Something has to give, doesn’t it?

Kris Olds

* Hay, Colin (1999) ‘Crisis and the structural transformation of the state: interrogating the process of change’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1(3): 317-344.

Graphic feed: Cultivating regenerative medicine innovation in China

Source: McMahon, D.S., Thorsteinsdóttir, H., Singer, P.A., and Daar, A.S. (2010) ‘Cultivating regenerative medicine innovation in China’, Regenerative Medicine, 5(1): 35-44.

‘Generation crunch’ (or, what is happening to graduate jobs and the ‘graduate premium’ in the UK)

Early this week, the Centre for Enterprise (CFE) in the UK released their report Generation Crunch: the demand for recent graduates on SME.

The report is essentially concerned with the employment prospects for university graduates in Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and makes for particularly interesting reading.

Focusing on SME’s as sources of employment is important because, as they note;

While there is a relatively clear picture of this demand from the public sector and larger businesses, much less is known about the demand from SMEs. This matters, as there are an estimated 4.8 million SMEs in the UK, employing 23.1 million people and together they account for 99% of all enterprises.

Several findings stand out in their report. The first is that the CFE’s survey of over 500 SMEs in the East Midlands region of the UK highlighted confusion over the graduate ‘brand’ with 29% incorrectly identifying A-Levels (that is an upper or senior school exit qualification in the UK) as a graduate qualification.

Even when furnished with the correct definition of a graduate level qualification, it is clear that the recruitment of Generation Crunch graduates is a minority pursuit — just 11% of SMEs had taken on a recent graduate in the past 12 months and only 12% indicated they would do so in the next 12 months.

Almost a third (32%) of those firms that were not hiring graduates reported that nothing would make them recruit a graduate in the next year and the reason for most was a lack of demand, rather than an inadequate or unsuitable supply of graduates.

In an interview this week with the Guardian, James Kewin, joint managing director of the Centre for Enterprise, is reported as saying:

There is not a clear or shared understanding of the term graduate among small and medium size businesses. There is a clear need to rationalise the plethora of qualification frameworks, levels and agencies that currently litter the education and skills landscape and to develop an easily understandable summary of what is and what isn’t a graduate-level qualification.

He said efforts to boost the proportion of graduates in jobs could have only a marginal impact. “Most small and medium size businesses that do not recruit reported that lack of demand, rather than inadequate and unsuitable supply, was their primary reason for not recruiting,” he said. “This suggests that the trend for increasing the employability skills of graduates will, in isolation, have only a marginal impact. The same is true of initiatives aimed at promoting, subsidising or improving access to graduate recruits. While they may lead to a short-term reduction in graduate unemployment, they do not address the fundamental barrier – lack of business need – that prevents most small and medium size businesses from recruiting.”

This is also particularly damaging news for the UK government at the current time, given that it is busy trying to encourage more students to enrol in university studies.

In the Foreword to the recent new ‘Framework for Higher Education’, Higher Ambitions, released in late 2009, the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills – Peter Mandelson – promised that:

A university education can be an entry ticket to the best paid employment and a preparation for a globalised world of work (p. 24).

What makes the CFE’s research potential dynamite is the implications it has for the government’s review currently being led by Lord Browne, former Head of BP, on lifting the cap on university tuition fees in English, Northern Ireland, and Welsh universities with English students in them.

Image courtesy of Bianca Soucek

Lifting the cap on tuition fees is sold to students as compensated for by a  ‘graduate premium’. In other words, students who invest in university undergraduate studies (and with increased student fees they are investing more of their own funds in their studies) will continue to earn ‘considerably more’ over a lifetime than those who don’t.

Last year GlobalHigherEd reported on the OECD’s statistical evidence about declining graduate premiums, despite the OECD’s own strong claims about the positive economic returns from investing in university studies. We pointed out that the evidence is clear; the value of the premium holds only as long as its value as a positional good is secured. The greater the number of students entering university, the more the value of the premium reduces.

This, of course, is what is behind Lord Browne’s observations in early December, 2009 and reported by BBC news. Lord Browne  calculated the graduate premium as being  1/4  (£100,000) of the one claimed by government (£400,000); this inflated figure was also the one used by government when it justified its increase in the cap on university tuition fees (from £1,225 to £3,225) which was implemented in 2007. Had the value of a university premium declined, the press asked? No, said the government! The question, of course, is who are we talking about? Clearly everyone is not in the same boat, and some might not be in a boat at all.

In 2007 a study on the economics of a degree by PricewaterhouseCoopers for Universities UK produced a different figure for the ‘graduate premium’  –   of an average of £160,000. This study pointed out, however, that the ‘average’ concealed important differences between students – with medical and dentistry students earning a ‘graduate premium’ of around £340,000, humanities students around £51, 500, and arts students  £35,000. Now it is not difficult to do the maths on this one. Investing in an arts degree does not make for good economic sense.  Indeed PricewaterhouseCooper’s report that males with an arts undergraduate degree will earn 4% less than males who hold an A-level qualification only.

When faced with…

• limited job prospects if the CFE’s data on SME’s and graduate employment is anything to go by
• likely cuts in UK public sector spending as the government manages its worst financial crisis since the 1930s
• knowledge that subject of study, gender, social class, income, non-traditional entry qualifications, and so on, can mediate the value of a ‘graduate premium’ (positively and negatively) and therefore should be placed into the mix of any hard-edged economic consideration
• a poor return on investing in a university degree if studies are in areas like arts and humanities
• a likely increase in the cost of university tuition after the election to inject funding into a limping university sector

…some students and their families could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that a university education at all costs is simply not worth it as an economic investment in their future. This conclusion is likely to apply to families in other OECD countries, and not just the UK.

Governments might be better served if they came clean on the economic argument. Instead it should emphasize the value of university studies for social, cultural and political reasons (indeed the OECD’s recent Education at a Glance 2009, p. 176 cites figures which show that ‘political interest’ is enhanced by a 20 % point increase in probability when an individual has a tertiary education).

By recovering, valuing, and making prominent, these dimensions and outcomes of intellectual inquiry, we could then put such knowledge and capability to work on important global problems, like poverty, climate change, sustainability, and building more equitable and socially cohesive communities.

Susan Robertson

Graphic feed: launching the Global Institutional Profiles Project

Source: Thomson Reuters, 6 January 2010.

Brazil’s new Latin American and global integration universities launched

As 2009 drew to a close, Brazil’s Senate granted official authorization for the establishment of a new, very different kind of university in Brazil – the Federal University for Latin America Integration, otherwise known as UNILA.

Unanimously passed on December 16^th 2009, the Bill now enables UNILA to formally announce itself as a university, instead of a fledging project under the banner of the Institute for Advanced Studies, with oversight by the University of Parana, in the Brazilian state of Parana.

UNILA is one of three regional integration universities launched by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006 to advance Brazil’s interests within the region and globally. The other two university projects are UNILAB – the Afro-Brazilian University of Integration, and UNIAM – the University of Amazonian Integration.

These Brazilian initiatives were the latest addition to a rapidly changing higher education landscape around the globe, and one that is set to continue in 2010 (as implied in a recent NY Times report about the implications of the collapse of Dubai’s overheated economy for branch campuses such as Michigan State University and Rochester Institute of Technology).

Dubai’s spectacular meltdown in December was matched by a stunning $61m launch party for Saudi Arabia’s ‘House of Wisdom’ – the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST which Kimberly Coulter covered for GlobalHigherEd.

As Kris Olds wrote in his introduction to Coulter’s entry:

KAUST is a unique experiment in how to organize an institution to facilitate innovation in scientific knowledge production, a secure and efficient compound (hence Saudi Aramco’s involvement), a defacto sovereign wealth fund, a demonstration effect for new approaches to higher education in Saudi Arabia, and many other things (depending on standpoint).

So what do these initiatives have in common? Money aside (KAUST has an endowment of around US$11bn), but like KAUST, Brazil’s three new universities reflect a shared ambition: to use international higher education networks to advance cultural, political and economic projects.

However while KAUST is aimed at developing a world class national university in Saudi Arabia via the recruitment of global talent (academics and students), state of the art buildings and cutting edge development projects, UNILA, UNILAB and UNIAM are aimed at creating a ’supranational’, ‘global’ and ‘regional’  university respectively, drawing upon staff and students from within the wider region, or from across south-south networks (UNILAB) – though each,  as I will show below, have distinctive visions and territorial reaches with UNILAB the most global.

In August of 2009, I had the privilege of attending the official launch of UNILA.  Close to the fabulous Iguacu Falls,  in Foz, Parana, UNILA is being developed on a 43 hectare site granted by Itaipu Binacional, the bi-national energy company running the huge hydro-electric dam providing energy to Paraguay and the southern cone of Brazil.

The objectives of UNILA are to pursue inter-regional trans-disciplinary research and teaching in areas of joint interest of the MERCOSUL member countries (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay) focusing, for example, upon use of natural resources, trans-border biodiversity, social sciences and linguistic research, international relations as well as relevant disciplines for strategic development.

Unlike KAUST, however, whose model is US-oriented (in becoming the MIT of the East, the ‘Stanford by the Seashore’), UNILA’s mission and approach to knowledge is shaped by a distinctive Latin American commitment. Each course has a Patron and a Founder.

The first Patrons have been chosen for being Latin American names who have left relevant academic-scientific contributions associated to a field of knowledge , while course founders have been appointed for the high academic prestige in their respective fields of knowledge as well as renowned international competence in their specialities.

10 Professorial Chairs have been appointed to UNILA. Each Chair has a mandate to develop courses in ways that are inspired by, and advance, the intellectual legacy of the Patron. For instance, in the area of science, technology and innovation,  founding Chair, Hebe Vessuri, will draw inspiration from the patron Amilcar Herrerra (1920-1995) – an Argentinean geologist who valued inter-disciplinary knowledge and who have argued that the solution to problems lay not with science as progress, but in the interface with policy and politics.

These patrons are clearly not the organic intellectuals of the ruling classes. Many of these patrons, such as the Chilean writer Francisco Bilbao (1823-65), and Paraguay’s Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), have spent years in exile.

The target student population for UNILA is 10,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and post-graduate programmes leading to MA and PhD degrees. Entrants will be required to sit a university entry examination that will be offered in two versions: one with a Portuguese language requirement for Brazilian citizens and a Spanish Language for the foreign candidates of eligible member countries. Lectures will be offered in both Portuguese and Spanish, as it is expected that half of the teaching staff will be from the regional member countries.

By way of contrast with UNILA, UNILAB is the most global in ambition. This unilateral Portuguese-speaking Afro-Brazilian University of Integration will have  campuses in various  Portuguese speaking countries (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sâo Tomé and Príncipe, and East Timor). Expected to open for enrolment in the beginning of   2010, UNILAB is hailed as a political-pedagogic innovation project (see here for information on UNILAB developments).

The principal aim of UNILAB is to encourage and strengthen co-operation, partnerships, and cultural, educational and scientific exchanges between Brazil an member states of   the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) listed above. UNILAB will also focus on collaboration with the African countries of the CPLP,  aiming to contribute to these nations’ socio-economic development, including reducing ‘brain drain’ problems currently experienced by African countries.

UNILAB is intended to become an integrated multi-campus institution with campuses in all the   African member countries of the CPLP. Each of these campuses will also be integrated within the regions where they are located. Its main campus will be established in the city of Redenção in Brazil’s North-Eastern state of Ceará, approximately 60 kilometres from the city of Fortaleza. Redenção has been selected to host the main campus because it was the first municipality that had abolished slavery in Brazil, and because the region currently does not yet host a university. The main campus is also expected to function as an instrument for the strategic social-economic development of the North-East of Brazil.

In a report carried by the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education on these initiatives, Brazil’s Minister of Education, Fernando Haddad, commented:

We will not offer traditional programmes, but instead we will construct a common identity between the countries, that makes it possible to contribute to the social-economic development of each of the countries involved.

The third, more regional, initiative, Universidade Federal da Integração Amazônica, or UNIAM, will be established as a public multi-campus university, with a main campus in the Brazilian city of Santarém, and three satellite campuses in the cities Itaituba, Monte Alegre and Oriximiná, all located in Brazil’s state of Pará.

The main aim of UNIAM will be to encourage social-economic integration of the Amazon region, which includes not only parts of Brazil, but also areas of eight surrounding countries.

UNIAM’s  main campus will be established in the Brazilian city of Santarém, and three satellite campuses in the cities Itaituba, Monte Alegre and Oriximiná, all located in Brazil’s state of Pará. The aim of the new institution will be to encourage social-economic integration of the Amazon region, which includes not only parts of Brazil, but also areas of eight surrounding countries.

While it is unclear at the moment when the new university will open for enrolment, by 2013 UNIAM is expected to offer 41 programmes at Bachelor’s, Master’s and doctoral levels.  The Brazilian government will reportedly cover the US$107 million budget that will be needed to pay for the establishment and personnel costs of the new university until 2012.

Described by the Brazilian Ministry of Education as particular ‘political-pedagogic innovation projects’, these three new universities are intended to enhance national, regional and global integration, and demonstrate to the world that it may be possible to unite different countries through education.

These are fascinating initiatives likely to liven up the global higher education landscape in 2010. They reflect not only emerging regionalisms, but potential shifts in the sites and stakes of global and regional knowledge production and power.

Susan Robertson

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year from GlobalHigherEd

Promoting collisions between disciplines to foster new approaches to biomedical problems

Throughout the 2009-2010 academic year a large number of us at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are engaging in some conversations via a Promoting Collisions dinner series.  The dinner series is primarily sponsored by the people behind the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery complex; a large new public-private structure that is emerging from the (now) frozen ground in Madison, WI.  As noted on the Wisconsin Institutes‘ website:

The institutes will build on the long tradition of interdisciplinary research at UW–Madison. Today’s problems relating to human health and welfare are more complex than one individual, one department or one institution can solve. The twin research institutes will encourage the kind of cross-pollination needed to attack these problems and the building’s Town Center will serve as a vibrant crossroads for researchers to meet, hold joint conferences and participate in collaborative events that will extend the research of the efforts at the institutes beyond the facility itself. One of the project’s key objectives is to foster new approaches to biomedical problems at the convergence of various disciplines, including the arts, business, education, humanities, law, social sciences  and more.

The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery is also involved in sponsoring a variety of other initiatives (e.g., the symposium advertised in the poster above) on our campus prior to the opening of the building in fall of 2010.

Today’s entry is a photo-oriented one; images taken during a stroll around the building a few days ago in the -19 C weather (when my hands nearly froze).  I wonder if interdisciplinary conversations and disciplinary ‘collisions’ are enabled or constrained by cold weather?  If they are constrained, what hope does the University of Alberta have seeing that it is -45 C in Edmonton today!

More seriously, the Promoting Collisions conversations are fascinating. It is also very interesting to see the shape, in terms of design and programming, that this new ‘knowledge space’ is being formed into to facilitate hoped for breakthroughs at the intersection of disciplines like computer science or mathematics and biology.

Debates about the value and effects of ‘interdisciplinarity’ are sure to continue, as exemplified by Jerry A. Jacob’s recent piece (‘Interdisciplinary hype‘) in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet such debates are likely to be grounded in new forms of empirical reality when complexes like the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery are completed, and strategically designed on-site ‘collisions’ begin to occur, leaving a mark of one form or another.

Kris Olds

Graphic feed: launching Tenurometer or, audit culture and the mining of Google Scholar

Source: Tenurometer (2009), developed by Diep Thi Hoang & Fil Menczer, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington.

Taking note of export earnings

Editor’s note: this is reprinted from the UK Higher Education International Unit’s most recent newsletter (International Focus issue 48.25.11.09).

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Ahh – the end of the workday and time for a glass of wine: a fine New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, perhaps?

The first time we heard that education generates more ‘export earnings’ for the New Zealand economy than does wine, we were both knocked off of our seats, and not because we had too many glasses! We were surprised because New Zealand’s white wine industry is world-famous – indeed almost as famous as Australia’s tourism industry. But wait: here too, it is now clear that education exports (ie, the provision of education across a border, either physically or virtually) generate more revenue for the Australian economy than does tourism, and is pegged third after exports of coal and iron ore.

Recent data released by the governments of Canada, the UK and Australia all point to similarly striking figures. In Canada last month, for example, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade noted that international students generated 83,000 jobs, C$291m (£166m) in government revenue, and contributed C$6.5bn (£3.7bn) to the Canadian economy. The last figure is higher than Canada’s earnings for coniferous lumber ($5bn/£2.8) and coal ($6bn/£3.4bn).

In 2007, the British Council estimated the value of education and training exports to the UK economy at nearly £28bn, which is more than the automotive or financial services industries. And just a few days ago, NAFSA, the US-based Association of International Educators, noted that international students and their dependants contributed approximately $17.6bn (£10.5bn) to the US economy in the 2008-09 academic year.

It is increasingly common to hear about such numbers, and more often than not even experts within the higher education sphere are surprised by the significance of the impact of providing international students with an education. Given this, we would like to flag three key issues to think about when faced with these admittedly staggering numbers.

First, it is important to think about why these numbers are being sought at this point in history. We would argue that these numbers are being constituted, and debated about, in the context of an ideological transition – one that increasingly enables views to emerge of higher education as a driver of economic versus cultural-political change. For example, a decade or two ago, it would have been impossible to imagine creating tables such as the one profiled in Kate Geddie’s entry in GlobalHigherEd in which education is measured against ‘scrap plastics’ or ‘chemical woodpulp’. Thus, a new organising logic, to use Saskia Sassen’s phrase, is emerging: one that reframes higher education as an urban/national/global services industry, for good and for bad.

Second, it is worth thinking about the emerging capabilities to generate such analyses. Interestingly, almost all of the analyses have been generated by consultants working on behalf of ministries of education, or ministries of foreign affairs and trade. It is noteworthy that there is little capacity within the state to assess such impacts, so representatives of the state reply upon consultants with track records of studying an array of economic development impacts. Most noteworthy, though, is the increased involvement of ministries, other than education, in the sponsoring of such analyses. Thus, the reframing of education as a service industry is dependent upon a reconfiguration of the responsibilities of ministries for the education sphere, such that ministries of trade, as well as immigration and sometimes foreign affairs, are coming into the picture. This emerging trend has huge implications for the future of the governance of higher education.

Third, there is striking variation in the nature and quality of the analytical models adopted by ministries, and their consultants, in accounting for the economic impact of education exports. Despite our comment above about emerging capacity to assess such impacts, and of the role of more powerful ministries in this analytical exercise, the numbers are not yet comparable (nor, in some cases, trustworthy). For example, should all levels and forms of education be accounted for? Or, to what degree is national support (e.g., research assistantships, fellowships, associate instructors) for foreign students accounted for in the analytical models on offer? These are but two of dozens of questions that could be asked about the numbers that have emerged to date. International comparability is impossible at this point in time, and one has to wonder why this is the case if the sector is so seemingly significant in economic terms.

In closing, the globalisation of education, including higher education, is undeniably creating a diverse array of economic, social, cultural impacts. The export-earnings issue is starting to capture the attention of powerful stakeholders, public and private, for-profit and non-profit. Yet the quality of the analyses to date is patchy at best, and certainly not comparable internationally. Why might this be the case, and what could or should be done about it?

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson