China: from ‘emerging contender’ to ‘serious player’ in cross-border student mobility

Last year we carried a series of reports (see here, here and here) on the global distribution of student mobility. While the US and the UK had the lion’s share of this market, with 22% and 12% respectively, we noted China had made big gains. With 7% of the global market and in 6th place overall, it was an ’emerging contender’ to be taken seriously, with trends suggesting that it was a serious player as a net ‘exporter’ and importer of education services.

So it was with great interest I read today’s Chronicle of Higher Education report by reporter Mara Hvistendahl, on China now being ranked in 5th place (behind the US, UK, France and Germany) as an “importer” of foreign students. See this OECD chart, from its new Education at a Glance 2008 report, to situate this development trend and China’s current position [recall that China is not an OECD member country].

As the Chronicle report notes, this is a far cry from China’s 33 overseas students in 1950.

Given, too, that in 1997 there were only 39,000 foreign students whilst in 2007 there were some 195,000, this 5-fold increase in numbers in 10 years (Chinese Ministry of Education and the China Scholarship Council) represents a staggering achievement and the one that is likely to continue. So, how has China achieved this. According to the Chronicle report:

To attract students, China offers competitive packages, replete with living stipends, health insurance, and, sometimes, travel expenses. In 2007 the China Scholarship Council awarded 10,000 full scholarships — at a cost of 360 million yuan ($52-million) — to international students. By 2010 the council aims to double the number of awards.

Two-fifths of the 2007 grants went to students in Asia. In a separate scholarship program that reflects its global political strategy, China is using its strengths in science and technology to appeal to students in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, forming partnerships with governments in those regions to sponsor students in medicine, engineering, and agriculture.

But there are other factors as well pushing China up the ladder as an education destination. China is increasing regarded as a strategic destination by American students and the US government for study abroad. Figures reported by Institute of International Education fact-sheet on student mobility to and from the US show an increase of 38% in US students going to China in just 1 year (2005/2006). This also represents a profound shift in Sino-American educational relations.

In sum, these figures reflect the outcome of an overall strategy by China (perversely aided by the US’s own global trade and diplomacy agenda):

• to develop a world class higher education system;
• to internationalize Chinese higher education;
• to stem the tide of students flowing out of China;
• to attract half a million students to China by 2020; and
• to advance Chinese interests through higher education diplomacy.

If realized, this would put China at the top of the exporting nations along with the US. It will also register China as a global higher education player with global impact. Without doubt this will change the geo-politics of global higher education.

Susan Robertson

Video feed: Chambre 124, Cité International Universitaire de Paris (dir. Fabio Brasil, 2006)

Part 1 (7:28 mins)

Part 2 (6:53 mins)

Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris: walking through one past, present, and future (?) of global higher ed

Near the end of my sabbatical year in Paris (and Europe more generally), I spent some time taking photographs on the grounds of La Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, which is located on a 34 hectare site in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

I used to spend a lot of time on the lovely grounds of Cité Internationale with my two children as we lived near it. I also had a chance to visit one of the residences (La Fondation des Etats-Unis) where my eldest son’s cello teacher was based (courtesy of a Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship).

The Cité Internationale “represents the largest concentration of residence halls in Paris and the Ile-de-France region: 5 600 beds in 38 residences”, in addition to a “whole range of facilities and services” for both the students and researchers who stay, as well as the general public and even tourists. Historically, and at the present moment, Cité Internationale primarily provides services for students and researchers from outside of France, though some students from regions outside of Paris have and continue to be welcomed.

In some ways the Cité Internationale is clearly of a previous era, marked as it is by an inter-national conceptual framework. This is because the 38 residences were primarily focused on supporting students from particular countries, or else distinctive regions (usually those with a French colonial complexion).

See this link for a link to home pages for all of these residences: Abreu de Grancher (Cuba), Argentine, Arménie, Arts et Métiers, Asie du Sud-Est, Avicenne (previously Iran), Biermans-Lapôtre (Belgian and Luxembourg), Brésil, Cambodge, Canada, CICS (International Center for Short Stays), Collège Franco-Britannique, Danemark, Deutsch de la Meurthe, Espagne, Etats-Unis, Heinrich Heine (Germany), Héllenique Honnorat, Inde, Industries agricoles et alimentaires, Institut national agronomique, Italie, Japon, Liban, Lucien Paye (Africa), Maison Internationale, Maroc, Mexique, Monaco, Néerlandais (collège), Norvège, Portugal (André De Gouveia), Provinces de France, Robert Garric, Suède, Suisse, Tunisie, Victor Lyon.

In contrast to today’s thinking, foreign students from the late 1920s on were placed within their national residences within the Cité Internationale, an approach to hosting that could not help but inhibit aspects of inter-cultural dialogue on a day to day residential basis. To be sure there was inter-cultural dialogue; indeed this was the logic behind the establishment of Cité Internationale in the 1920s:

The Cité internationale universitaire of Paris was created in the pacifist context of the 1920s to support exchanges among students of the whole world. The story starts in 1920 when an important French industrialist, Emile DEUTSCH DE LA MEURTHE, wishing to create an enduring gift to society, contacted Paul APPELL, vice-chancellor of the University of Paris. Worried by the difficulties of students’ housing, Appell suggested to him founding a university residence. André HONNORAT, Minister for Public Education, approved of the project and devoted all his energy for nearly the next thirty years to its realization

Yet the exchanges would have been focused upon scholarly matters for the most part, versus the social learning associated with the mundane (e.g., exchanges regarding shared cooking duties, or how to coordinate the cleaning of shared apartments, both hilariously examined in the 2002 film L’Auberge espagnole). In short it is hard to imagine any authority, these days, placing so many foreign students within their ‘national’ houses. Indeed most residences in Cité Internationale now welcome applications from students of any nationality.

Yet in other ways, Cité Internationale was and is decades ahead of the majority of current thinking about the handling of mobile foreign students and scholars.

First, Cité Internationale is a product of a higher education era where the philanthropists and industrialists were vigorously active, far-sighted, and more concerned with encouraging enlightened thinking and substantive change versus their being fixated upon their personal wealth or disbursing some of this wealth under the right tax conditions, ideally with a naming rights rider. As the Cité website notes:

The Cité was founded in 1925, thanks to the generosity of industrialists, bankers and foreign foundations. Under the aegis of the minister André HONNORAT, the first president of the Cité, the industrialist Émile DEUTSCH DE LA MEURTHE, the banker David DAVID-WEILL, followed by many others [e.g., John D. ROCKEFELLER Jr.], offered to the future elites of the five continents a place of exceptional welcome. Their goal was to promote peace, exchanges and friendship among peoples after the trauma of the first World War. This is a mission still germane today.

With considerable foresight they established what has been deemed a “private foundation of public utility”. Yet 83 years later, in 2008, the EU, most member states, and numerous stakeholder organizations are facing huge challenges trying to cultivate philanthropy with respect to higher education, dominated as it is by national and sometimes state governments, with some funding also coming from the supra-national EU level. Can you point me to a new higher ed space, of this scale, anywhere in the world (let alone Europe), that is the product of “industrialists, bankers and foreign foundations”, in partnership with multiple levels of government?

And second, despite some challenges associated with housing foreign exchange students in a designated space (a campus, and within residences), spaces like Cité Internationale reflect the production of a service space, a space for knowledge production, and a space for the formation of social relations, that is not associated with any one university, while also being designed to ground mobile exchange students in a different territory for lengthy periods of time.

Thus we see musicians like the talented cellist who taught my son living side by side with chemists associated with university X in the Paris city-region, fine art scholars associated with university Y in Paris city-region, and mathematicians associated with research institute Z in the Paris city-region. This may have been, and is still (to a lesser degree) an international space, but it is also an exemplary interdisciplinary and inter-institutional space that brings together international scholars associated with many institutions that are based throughout the Paris city-region. This partly explains why the Region Ile-de-France has played such an important role in the substantial renovations process (that has been underway for over a decade). Cité Internationale is thus a form of higher education for regional development in a globalizing era, though via an initiative framed back in the 1920s! Imagine multiple universities coordinating the creation of such a space in a city-region like Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, Sydney or Toronto, though in a manner that folds in more students from the host country.

The remainder of this entry is photographic in nature – a tour through Cité Internationale, especially the facades of the central meeting space (the Maison Internationale, financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.), and the “houses” that were designed (primarily between 1923 and 1969) to theoretically reflect national cultures. Many of the architects (e.g., Le Corbusier) were national heroes with international stature. This is a landscape designed to be read, and it reflects a diversity of conceptual currents that were prominent at the time, including the notion of culture as trait (versus process), colonial visions and postcolonial adjustments, and especially the international modern movement (which is captured very well in the Brazilian and Swiss houses). Each house also has a distinct and evolving history, for the operation of national or regional houses often reflected national crises including wars, genocide, revolutions (e.g., Iran), decolonization and independence, and so on.

Recall that 5,600 residents are housed in the Cité with thousands more visiting the grounds on a daily basis. I’ll leave it to you to detect what nations or regions, if any, these buildings represent, though link here if you need some hints…

Kris Olds

Update: also see ‘Video feed: Chambre 124, Cité International Universitaire de Paris’ (dir. Fabio Brasil, 2006)

The Bologna Process in Africa: a case of aspiration, inspiration, or both?

The original Bologna Process architects must surely rub their eyes on occasions, and wonder quite how ‘they’ managed to let a genie ‘so big’ out of a bottle that is more often characterized as a ‘bottleneck of bureaucracy’.

The Bologna Process is not only one of the biggest news stories in higher education in Europe (see our stories here, here and here), but its magic seems to be spreading with tsunamic affect. Bologna is fast becoming a truly global phenomenon. Nations as far afield as Cameroon, China, Australia, Russia and Brazil, are either talking about, or signing on to, a Bologna style ‘restructuring brand’. Last year, the Bologna Follow-up Group released its report on the ‘external dimension’ of the Bologna Process, and whilst wrapped up in ‘euro-speak’ (‘dimension’ being a euphemism for the various modalities of Europe as a political project), it nevertheless makes for very, very, interesting reading.

Of particular interest, then, is this week’s World University News report on the Bologna Process in Africa, on this occasion with a focus on Cameroon. Since 2003 (the Bologna Process began only four years earlier in 1999) a number of francophone African countries have begun the reform of their higher education systems. These changes are regarded as essential, in view of the need for the global harmonization of higher education and increased student mobility.

For many African countries, the Cameroon included, their students study abroad in those countries which were their former colonial masters. As a result, as University World News reports:

…in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, the number of African students studying in France totalled 125,585, almost half of all students from abroad. Nearly 54,000 of these were from sub-Saharan Africa, of whom the 6,280 Cameroonians represented the second highest contingent, after Senegal.

Around Africa, such as in the Maghreb region (made up of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), groupings of countries are busy putting the Bologna model into place. With higher-education traditions modeled after the French system, all three former French colonies are currently realigning their higher education systems with the licence, master, doctorat (LMD or 3-5-8) architecture that is now a part of the French higher-education landscape.

These processes have been pushed forward by a series of regional meetings. In July 2007, a conference was convened in the Democratic Republic of Congo to discuss African Universities’ Adaptation to the Bologna Process. This meeting followed two conferences in Dakar, Senegal (July 2005) and El Jadida, Morocco (May 2006). The 2007 conference aimed to discuss ways in which African universities could use lessons learned from the Bologna process to build more cooperative international relationships across four main themes:

• the decision process that has brought African universities or countries to opt for the Bologna model
• the direct or indirect effects of the decision to adopt the Bologna model: curriculum reform, quality assurance and accreditation, mobility, recognition and joint degrees, professional master’s/research master’s degrees and doctoral schools
• the current evolution of the emerging countries’ universities, and their place in globalization
• the role of international and/or financial organizations in the promotion of the Bologna model.

It is clearly important to ensure articulation between different countries qualifications regimes to ensure ease of mobility across borders.

However, this is not the only reason for advancing a Bologna-inspired restructuring of higher education. It is also being used as a tool to generate new forms of regionalism, a development GlobalHigherEd has been covering in earlier entries (see here and here). The World Education Services, for example, reports that for the three countries of the Maghreb, much of this regional collaboration was undertaken with an eye to developing a ‘Euro-Mediterranean Higher Education and Research Area.’ A founding document for the proposed education area was signed in January 2006 and is known as the Catania Declaration . In addition to Euro-Mediterranean and Maghreb countries, Egypt and Jordan are also signatory to the Declaration.

So, while the advance of the Bologna Process in Europe does have important implications for those countries that continue to have strong ties to Europe’s system of higher education and labour markets, Bologna is also important as it is triggering new pockets and forms of regionalisms. It is in this sense, then, that we might say that Bologna in Africa is both aspirational and inspirational.

Susan Robertson

Has higher education become a victim of its own propaganda?

Editor’s note: today’s guest entry was kindly written by Ellen Hazelkorn, Director, and Dean of the Faculty of Applied Arts, and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland. She also works with the OECD’s Programme for Institutional Management of Higher Education (IMHE). Her entry should be read in conjunction with some of our recent entries on the linkages and tensions between the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy, the role of foundations and endowments in facilitating innovative research yet also heightening resource inequities, as well as the ever present benchmarking and ranking debates.

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The recent Council of the European Union’s statement on the role of higher education is another in a long list of statements from the EU, national governments, the OECD, UNESCO, etc., proclaiming the importance of higher education (HE) to/for economic development. While HE has long yearned for the time in which it would head the policy agenda, and be rewarded with vast sums of public investment, it may not have realised that increased funding would be accompanied with calls for greater accountability and scrutiny, pressure for value-for-money, and organisational and governance reform. Many critics cite these developments as changing the fundamentals of higher education. Has higher education become the victim of its own propaganda?

At a recent conference in Brussels a representative from the EU reflected on this paradox. The Lisbon Strategy identified a future in which Europe would be a/the leader of the global knowledge economy. But when the statistics were reviewed, there was a wide gap between vision and reality. The Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, which has become the gold standard of worldwide HE rankings, has identified too few European universities among the top 100. This was, he said, a serious problem and blow to the European strategy. Change is required, urgently.

University rankings are, whether we like it or not, beginning to influence the behaviour of higher education institutions and higher education policy because they arguably provide a snap-shot of competition within the global knowledge industrial sector (see E. Hazelkorn, Higher Education Management and Policy, 19:2, and forthcoming Higher Education Policy, 2008). Denmark and France have introduced new legislation to encourage mergers or the formation of ‘pôles’ to enhance critical mass and visibility, while Germany and the UK are using national research rankings or teaching/learning evaluations as a ‘market’ mechanism to effect change. Others, like Germany, Denmark and Ireland, are enforcing changes in institutional governance, replacing elected rectors with corporate CEO-type leadership. Performance funding is a feature everywhere. Even the European Research Council’s method of ‘empowering’ (funding) the researcher rather than the institution is likely to fuel institutional competition.

In response, universities and other HEIs are having to look more strategically at the way they conduct their business, organise their affairs, and the quality of their various ‘products’, e.g., educational programming and research. In return for increased autonomy, governments want more accountability; in return for more funding, governments want more income-generation; in return for greater support for research, governments want to identify ‘winners’; and in return for valuing HE’s contribution to society, governments want measurable outputs (see, for example, this call for an “ombudsman” for higher education in Ireland).

European governments are moving from an egalitarian approach – where all institutions are broadly equal in status and quality – to one in which excellence is promoted through elite institutions, differentiation is encouraged through competitive funding, public accountability is driven by performance measurements or institutional contacts, and student fees are a reflection of consumer buoyancy.

But neither the financial costs nor implications of this strategy – for both governments and institutions – have been thought through. The German government has invested €1.9b over five years in the Excellence Initiative but this sum pales into insignificance compared with claims that a single ‘world class’ university is a $1b – $1.5b annual operation, plus $500m with a medical school, or with other national investment strategies, e.g., China’s $20b ‘211 Project’ or Korea’s $1.2b ‘Brain 21’ programme, or with the fund-raising capabilities of US universities (‘Updates on Billion-Dollar Campaigns at 31 Universities’; ‘Foundations, endowments and higher education: Europe ruminates while the USA stratifies‘).

Given public and policy disdain for increased taxation, if European governments wish to compete in this environment, which policy objectives will be sacrificed? Is the rush to establish ‘world-class’ European universities hiding a growing gap between private and public, research and teaching, elite and mass education? Evidence from Ireland suggests that despite efforts to retain a ‘binary’ system, students are fleeing from less endowed, less prestigious institutes of technology in favour of ‘universities’. At one stage, the UK government promoted the idea of concentrating research activity in a few select institutions/centres until critics, notably the Lambert report and more recently the OECD, argued that regionality does matter.

Europeans are keen to establish a ‘world class’ HE system which can compete with the best US universities. But it is clear that such efforts are being undertaken without a full understanding of the implications, intended and unintended.

Ellen Hazelkorn

OECD’s science, technology and industry scoreboard 2007

Every two years the OECD publishes a Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard. Yesterday it released its 2007 assessment of trends of the macroeconomic elements intended to stimulate innovation: knowledge, globalization, and their impacts on economic performance.

GlobalHigherEd has taken a look at the major findings of the report and highlights them below. These indicators of ‘innovation’ presumed to lead to ‘economic growth’ reveal a particular set of assumptions at work . For instance:

• Investment in ‘knowledge’ (by which the OECD means software and education) has increased in most OECD countries.
• Expenditure on R&D (as a % of GDP) in Japan (3.3%) and the EU (1.7%) picked up in 2005 following a drop in 2004. However, in the US expenditure in R&D declined slightly (to 2.6% in 2005 from 2.7% in 2001). China is the big feature story here, with spending on R&D growing even faster than its economy – by 18% per year over the period 2000-2005.
• Countries like Switzerland, Belgium and English speaking countries (US, UK etc) have a large number of foreign doctoral students…with the US having the largest number. About 10,000 foreign citizens obtained a doctorate in S&E in the US in 2004/5 and represented 38% of S&E doctorates awarded.
• Governments in OECD countries are putting into place policy levers to promote R&D – such as directing government funds to R&D through tax relief.
• Universities are being encouraged to patent their innovations, and while the overall share of patents filed by universities has been relatively stable, this is increasing in selected OECD countries – France, Germany and Japan.
• European companies (EU27) finance 6.4% of R&D performed by public institutions and universities compared to 2.7% in the US and 2% in Japan.
• China now ranks 6th worldwide in their share of scientific publications and has raised its share of triadic patents from close to 0% in 1995 to 0.8% in 2005, though the US, Europe and Japan remain at the forefront. However, the US and the emerging economies (India, China, Israel, Singapore) focus upon high tech industries (computers, pharmaceuticals), whilst continental Europe focuses on medium technologies (automobiles, chemicals).
• In all OECD countries inventive activities are more geographically concentrated – in an innovation cluster – as in Silicon Valley and Tokyo.
• There has been a steady diffusion of ICT across all OECD countries – though take up if broadband in households varies, with Italy and Ireland showing only 10-15% penetration.
• Across all OECD countries, use of the internet has become standard in businesses with over 10 employees.

These highlights from the Scoreboard reflects a number of things. First, it is a particular (and very narrow) way of looking at the basis for developing knowledge societies. Knowledge, as we can see above, is reduced to software and education to develop human capital.

Second, there is a particular way of framing science and technology and its relationship to development – as in larger levels of expenditure on R&D, rates of scientific publications, use of ICTs.

Third, it is assumed that the combination of inventions, patents and innovations will be the necessary boost to economic growth. However, this approach privileges intellectual property rights over and above other forms of invention and innovation which might contribute to the intellectual commons, as in open source software.

Finally, we should reflect on the purpose the Scoreboard. Not only is a country’s ‘progress’ (or ‘lack of’) then used by politicians and policymakers to argue for boosting investment and performance in particular areas of science and technology, as in recruiting more foreign students into graduate programs, or the development of incentives such as the promise of an EU Blue Card to ensure the brainpower stays in the country, but the Scorecard is a pedagogical tool. That is, a country ‘learns’ about itself in relation to other players in the global economy and is given a clear message about the overall direction it should head in if it wants to be a globally competitive knowledge-based economy.

Susan Robertson

EU Blue Cards: not a blank cheque for migrant labour – says Barroso

The global competition for skilled labor looks like getting a new dimension – the EU is planning to issue “blue cards” to allow highly skilled non-Europeans to work in the EU. On Tuesday 23 October José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, announced plans to harmonize admission procedures for highly qualified workers. As President Barroso put it:

With the EU Blue Card we send a clear signal: Highly skilled people from all over the world are welcome in the European Union. Let me be clear: I am not announcing today that we are opening the doors to 20 million high-skilled workers! The Blue Card is not a “blank cheque”. It is not a right to admission, but a demand-driven approach and a common European procedure.

The Blue Card will also mean increased mobility for high-skilled immigrants and their families inside the EU.

Member States will have broad flexibility to determine their labour market needs and decide on the number of high-skilled workers they would like to welcome.

With regard to developing countries we are very much aware of the need to avoid negative “brain drain” effects. Therefore, the proposal promotes ethical recruitment standards to limit – if not ban – active recruitment by Member States in developing countries in some sensitive sectors. It also contains measures to facilitate so-called “circular migration”. Europe stands ready to cooperate with developing countries in this area.

Further details are also available in this press release, with media and blog coverage available via these pre-programmed Google searches. As noted the proposed scheme would have a common single application procedure across the 27 Member States and a common set of rights for non-EU nationals including the right to stay for two years and move within the EU to another Member State for an extension of one more year.

The urgency of the introduction of the blue card is framed in terms of competition with the US/Canada/Australia – the US alone attracts more than half of all skilled labor while only 5 per cent currently comes to the EU. This explanation needs to be seen in relation to two issues which the GlobalHigherEd blog has been following: the competition to attract and retain researchers and the current overproduction of Maths, Science and Technology graduates. Can the attractiveness of the EU as a whole compete with the pull of R&D/Industrial capacity in the US and the logic of English as the global language? Related to this obviously is the recent enlargement to 27 Member States where there are ongoing issues around the mobility of labor within the EU? We will continue to look beneath the claims of policy initiatives to see the underlying contradictions in approaches. The ongoing question of the construction of a common European labor market and boosting the attractiveness of EU higher ed institutions may be at least as important here as the supposed skilled labor shortages.

Futurology demographics seem to be at the heart of the explanation of the need to intensify the recruitment of non-EU labour – according to the Commission the EU will have a shortage of 20 million workers in the next 20 years, with one third of the EU population over the age of 65. Interestingly though, there is no specification of the kinds of skill shortages that far down the line – the current concern is that the EU currently receives 85 % of global unskilled labour.

Barroso and the Commission continue to try to handle the contradictions of EU brain attractiveness strategies by the preferred model of:

• fixed term contracts;
• limitations on recruitment from developing countries in sensitive sectors; and,
• the potentially highly tendentious notion of ‘circular migration’.

High skilled labour is effectively on a perpetual carousel of entry to and exit from the labour market with equal rights while in the EU which get lost at the point of departure from the EU zone only to reappear on re-entry, perhaps?

According to Reuters the successful applicants for a blue card would only need to be paid twice the minimum wage in the employing Member State – and this requirement would be lifted if the applicant were to be a graduate from an EU higher education institution. Two things are of interest here then – the blue card could be a way to retain anyone with a higher education qualification and there are implications for the continuing downward pressure on wage rates for the university educated. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out in relation to the attractiveness of EU universities if a blue card is the implied pay-off for successful graduation.

Peter D. Jones

Is the EU on target to meet the Lisbon objectives in education and training?

The European Commission (EC) has just released its annual 2007 Report Progress Towards the Lisbon Objectives in Education and Training: Indicators and Benchmarks. This 195 page document highlights the key messages about the main policy areas for the EC – from the rather controversial inclusion of schools (because of issues of subsidiarity) to what has become more standard fare for the EC – the vocational education and higher education sectors.

As we explain below, while the Report gives the thumbs up to the numbers of Maths, Science and Technology (MST) graduates, it gives the thumbs down to the quality of higher education. We, however, think that the benchmarks are far too simplistic and the conclusions drawn not sufficiently rigorous to support good policymaking. Let us explain.

The Report is the fourth in a series of annual assessments examining performance and progress toward the Education and Training 2010 Work Programme. These reports work as a disciplinary tool for Member States as well as contributing to making the EU more globally competitive.

To those of you unfamiliar with EC ‘speak’ – the EC’s Work Programme centers around the realization of 16 core indicators (agreed in May 2007 at the European Council and listed in the table below) and benchmarks (5) (also listed below) which emerged from the relaunch of the Lisbon Agenda in 2005.

Chapter 7 of this Report concentrates on progress toward modernizing higher education in Europe, though curiously enough there is no mention of the Bologna Process – the radical reorganization of the degree structure for European universities which has the US and Australia on the back-foot. Instead, three key areas are identified:

• mathematics, science and technology graduates (MST)
• mobility in higher education
• quality of higher education institutions

With regard to MST, the EU is well on course to surpass the benchmark of an increase in the number of tertiary graduates in MST. However, the report notes that demographic trends (decreasing cohort size) will slow down growth in the long term.

While laudable, GlobalHigherEd notes that it is not so much the number of graduates that are produced which is the problem. Rather, there are not enough attractive opportunities for researchers in Europe so that a significant percentage move to the US (14% of US graduates come from Europe). The long term attractiveness of Europe (see our recent entry) in terms of R&D is, therefore, still a major challenge.

With regard to mobility (see our earlier overview report), the EU has had an increase in the percentage of students with foreign citizenship. In 2004, every EU country, with the exception of Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia, recorded an increase in the % of students enrolled with foreign citizenship. Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Cyprus and the UK have the highest proportions with foreign student populations of more than 10%.

Over the period 2000 to 2005 the number of students going to Europe from China increased by 500% (from 20,000 in 2000 to 107,000 in 2005; see our more detailed report on this), while numbers from India increased by 400%. While there is little doubt that the USA’s homeland security policy was a major factor, students also view the lower fees and moderate living costs in countries like France and Germany as particularly attractive. In the main:

• the countries of origin of non-European students studying in the EU largely come from former colonies of the European member states
• mobility is within the EU rather than from beyond the EU, with the exception of the UK. The UK is also a stand-out case because of the small number of its citizens who study in other EU countries.

Finally, concerning the quality of higher education, the Bologna Reforms are nowhere to be seen. Instead the EC report uses the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWI) and the World Universities Ranking (WUR) by the Times Higher Education Supplement to discuss the issue of quality. The Shanghai Jiao Tong uses Nobel Awards, and citations indexes (e.g. SCI; SSCI) – however, not only is a Nobel Award a limited (some say false) proxy for quality, but the citation indexes systematically discriminate in favor of US based institutions and journals. Only scientific output is included in each of these rankings; excluded are other kinds of outputs from universities which might have an impact, such as patents, or policy advice.

While each ranking system is intended to be a measure of quality – it is difficult to know what we might learn when one (Times Higher) will rank an institution (for example, the London School of Economics) in 11th position while the other (Shanghai) ranks the same institution in 200th position. Such vast differences could only be confusing for potential students if they were using them to make their choices about a high quality institution. However, perhaps this is not the main purpose, and that it serves a more important one – of ratcheting up both competition and discipline through comparison.

League tables are now also being developed in more nuanced ways. In 2007 the Shanghai ranking introduced one by ‘broad subject field’ (see below). What is particularly interesting here is that the EU-27 does relatively well in Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences (ENG), Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy (MED) and Natural Sciences and Mathematics (SCI) in relation to the USA, compared with the Social Sciences (where the USA outflanks it by a considerable degree). Are Social Sciences in Europe this poor in terms of quality, and hence in serious trouble? GlobalHigherEd suggests that these differences are likely a reflection of the more internationalized/Anglocized publishing practices of the science, technology and medical fields, in comparison to the social sciences, who are committed in many cases to publishing in national languages.

The somewhat dubious nature of these rankings as indicators of quality does not stop the EC using them to show that of the top 100 universities, 54 are located in the USA and only 29 in Europe. And again, the overall project of the EC is to set the agenda at the European scale for Member States by putting into place at the European level a set of instruments–including the recently launched European Research Council–intended to help retain MST graduates as well as recruit the brightest talent from around the globe (particularly China and India) and keep them in Europe.

However, the MST capacity of the EU outruns its industry’s ability to absorb and retain the graduates. It is clear the markets for students and brains are developing in different ways in different countries but with clear ‘types’ of markets and consumers emerging. The question is: what would an EU ranking system achieve as a technology of competitive market making?

Susan Robertson and Peter Jones

Graphic feed: “research footprints” of US “competitors” in science and technology

Source: Adams J. (2007) ‘Scientific wealth and the scientific investments of nations’, in T. Galama and J. Hosek (eds.) Perspectives on U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, p. 40. [via the Scout Report]

Note 1: PUBERD = public R&D as a share of GDP.

Note 2: See a review of the report, and especially Adams’ chapter, in IntelliBriefs.

Competitive advantage and the mobile international student

Last week GlobalHigherEd featured a series of stories on the different players battling for market share in the global higher education market. We reviewed the recently published report by the Observatory of Borderless Higher Education (OBHE).

Today’s Inside Higher Ed also features a story from this report, drawing particular attention to the competitive advantages of the different players. These include whether students require a visa for short study visits, the cost of tuition (low or moderate), living costs (low or moderate), and whether there are programs available to foreign students to help them to prepare for study before they start classes – presumably language classes.

As we pointed out last week, France and Germany ‘scrub up’ well as possible study destinations – particularly for short periods. They have low tuition fees and moderate living costs, and their visa system would be present few problems for undergraduates wanting a short period of ‘study abroad’ . This might also be a useful tactic in luring back students to enrol in a graduate program, particularly if their experience is a positive one.

By comparison, the UK – a Major Player in the field like the US and Australia –scores only one tick in the competitive advantage box; that is, in their provision of programs to help students prepare for study. The downside for the prospective student is that the UK has a high living cost and high tuition fees. It does, however, have a relatively high brand image and ‘esteem’ value – something that Inside Higher Ed fails to point out.

As the market gets tighter, GlobalHigherEd agrees with Inside Higher Ed – that there are important strategic decisions to be made by institutions and countries if they want to not only stay competitive but increase market share. How might a nation go about making itself a desirable destination in this highly lucrative market? Alternatively, a country might currently be a desirable destination, but at present there are limited financial returns (aside from the not inconsequential returns through cost of living). The issue here for these low (or no) fee countries, such as Germany, France and Finland, is whether to respond to pressures to charge fees. Currently their figures of international students are multiplying rapidly – by more than 500% over the past five or so years. Will putting a fee structure into place for international students simply turn the tap off? This dilemma is likely to cause university administrators  more than a minor headache.

Susan Robertson

Comparative indicators of education in the United States and other G-8 countries

The US Department of Education‘s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), partly inspired by French Ministry of Education practices, has been producing a regular report titled Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries. This year’s title, released a couple of weeks ago, is Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2006. The 92 pp. report:

[D]escribes how the education system in the United States compares with education systems in the other G-8 countries–Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. Twenty indicators are organized in five sections: (1) population and school enrollment; (2) academic performance; (3) context for learning; (4) expenditure for education; and (5) education returns: educational attainment and income.

International comparison is, of course, very helpful when generating informed comparative insights on national education systems. It is also required to magnify the legitimacy of recommended policy changes.