The temporal rhythm of academic life in a globalizing era

The globalization of higher education and research is associated with a wide variety of shifts and changes, many of which (e.g., branch campuses) are debated about in relatively intense fashion. Other aspects of this transition, though, receive little attention, including the temporal rhythm of academic life; a rhythm being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed.

In many ways not much has changed for we continue to follow a seasonal rhythm: the build up to term, the fall and spring cycles (punctuated by brief breaks of variable lengths), and then a longer summer ‘break’. When I was an undergraduate my summers were associated with work at fish canneries, mineral prospecting, and drill camps (throughout British Columbia and the Yukon) – the legacy of living amidst a resource-based staples economy.

Summers during graduate student life in Canada and the UK were focused on research, with some holiday time. And summers now, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US (pictured to the right, at dusk), are associated with a mix of research and writing time, university service, and holiday time with my family. But the real temporal anchor is the twin semester (or quarters for some) cycle split by a summer break.

Scaling up, the rhythm of institutional life follows aspects of this seasonal cycle, albeit with noteworthy national and institutional variations. For example, research administrators kick into higher gear in the US and UK (where I am a visiting professor) during the summer and winter breaks before important national funding council deadlines, yet even research active university libraries shut down for much of the summer in France for the annual holiday cycle. Human resources managers everywhere get busy when new faculty and staff arrive in the July/August and December/January windows of time. We all welcome and say goodbye to many of our students at key windows of time throughout the year, whilst the term/semester/quarter cycle shapes, in bracing ways, the rhythms of contract (sessional) lecturers.

In an overall sense, then, it is this year-to-year seasonal rhythm, with fuzzy edges, that continues to propel most of us forward.

The globalization of higher education and research, though, is also extending, reducing, and bracketing our senses of time, as well as the structural rhythmic context in which we (as faculty members, students, and staff) are embedded.

For example, research on key ‘global challenges’ – something a variety of contributors to GlobalHigherEd have been reflecting about, and something international consortia (e.g., the Worldwide Universities Network) are seeking to facilitate – is inevitably long-term in nature. This is in part because of the nature of the issues being addressed, but also because of the practicalities and complications associated with developing international collaborative research teams. This said, government funding councils are resolutely national in orientation — they have a very hard time matching up budgetary and review cycles across borders and tying them up to the agendas of large international collaborative teams (CERN and a few other exemplars aside). So while research agendas and relationships need to be long-term in nature, we have really yet to develop the infrastructure to support a longer-term temporal rhythm when it comes to international collaborative research on ‘global challenges’.

Long-term thinking is also evident in the strategic thinking being undertaken by the European Commission regarding the role of universities in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as well as the European Research Area (ERA), in the context of the Lisbon agenda. Related forms of long-term thinking are evident in a whole host of agencies in the US regarding ‘non-traditional’ security matters regarding issues like dependency upon foreign graduates (e.g., ‘the coming storm’), comparative ‘research footprints’, and the like.

Moving the other way, the reduction and/or bracketing of temporal rhythms is most obvious in the higher education media, as well as the for-profit world of higher education, or in the non-profit world once endowments are created, and bonds are sold.

On the media front, for example, higher education outlets like US-based Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the UK-based Times Higher Education, are all active on a daily basis now with website updates, Twitter feeds, and once- to twice-daily email updates. The unhurried rhythms of our pre-digital era are long gone, and the pick-up in pace might even intensify.

On the for-profit and ratings front, stock value and revenue is tracked with increased precision, quarterly and annual reports are issued, and university data from networks of acquired universities are bundled together, while fund managers track every move of for-profit education firms. Interesting side effects can emerge, including replicant or Agent Smith-like dynamics where multiple offerings of honorary degrees to Nelson Mandela emerge within one network of universities controlled by the for-profit Laureate International Universities.

Ratings agencies such as Moody’s are also developing increased capacity to assess the financial health of higher education institutions, with a recent drive, for example, to “acquire liquidity data to provide a more direct and accurate gauge of the near-term liquidity standing” of each rated institution (on this issue see ‘Moody’s Probes Colleges on Cash’, Inside Higher Ed, 16 June 2010).

Or take the case of national governments, which are beginning to develop the capacity to track, analyse and communicate about international student flow vis a vis export earnings (see recent data below from Australian Education International’s Research Snapshot, May 2010).

This bracketing of time, which takes place in the Australian case on a combined monthly/annual cycle so as to enhance strategic planning and risk assessment at institutional, state, national, and international scales, has become both more thorough and more regular.

These are but a few examples of the new rhythms of our globalizing era. Assuming you agree with me that the temporal rhythm of academic life is being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed, who has the capability to adjust rhythms, for what purposes, and with what effects?

I’ll explore aspects of this reworking of temporal rhythms in a subsequent entry on the global rankings of universities; a benchmarking ‘technology’ (broadly defined) that bundles together universities around the globe into annual cycles of data requests, data provision, and highly mediatized launches.

Kris Olds

The US – India ‘knowledge’ relationship: the sleeping giant stirs!

Editor’s Note: This entry has been kindly prepared by Tim Gore, now Director of The Centre for Indian Business, University of Greenwich, London, UK.  Prior to this, Tim was Director of Education at the British Council in India, where he was responsible for growing the knowledge partnership between India and the UK. Tim also led the establishment of the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) that is profiled in an earlier blog entry.

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How will President Obama’s ambitious plans for a new diplomacy translate into practical international relations and how will this impact on the education sector? An early example of this may prove to be relations with India and some clues may be in the newly released Asia Society Task Force report: Delivering on the Promise: Advancing US Relations with India.  

The high level rhetoric for the US-India relationship may not have changed that much after all President Bush declared ‘the world needs India’ on his 2006 visit to the Indian School of Business (ISB) – Hyderabad –  a school touted by the new report as an example of what can be done with good US-India cooperation. The School works in partnership with Wharton and Kellogg and prompted a Bush accolade ‘You’ve got a great thing going’!

However, the tone of the report is a substantial departure from the Bush years. Democratic colors are now firmly fixed to the mast and references to ‘reciprocity’ and ‘understanding India’ abound, while the ‘world needs India’ has changed to ‘the USA needs India as an ally in its foreign policy issues’.

The education agenda is a little buried in this report. It has been classified under the second track ‘Joint Public-Private Partnerships for Complex Global Challenges’. Is this code meaning that there will be little Government funding available (seed-corn funding is mentioned briefly)? After all, educational relations between the two countries have flourished over the years, despite a relative absence of visible policy and public sector involvement. There are over 80,000 Indians studying in higher education in the US every year and the US dominates the ‘market’ for doctoral studies. Also, many commentators (see, for example,  Anna-Lee Saxenian’s book The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy) have pointed out the seminal role of talented Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and research links with the US are strong and growing.

There are also quite a number of US tertiary collaborations with India (although surprisingly bearing in mind the respective sizes of their tertiary sectors, not more than the number of UK collaborations). However, the use of ISB as a beacon of attainment highlights the key issue with US-India educational relations and the nuances of policy that the US will need to get right.

ISB is an exceptional institution, undoubtedly in the top tier of such institutions globally, in terms of how hard they work their students if nothing else! However ISB, with its powerful private sector Governing Board and influential international links (US presidents don’t drop into every management college with a foreign badge on the gate), is not accredited in India by the relevant regulatory body the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).

Similarly, the campus of the US Western International University run by the influential Modi family has no official status in India. If pressed, officials will say that it is ‘not legal’.

Australia, New Zealand and UK have a multilateral forum with India on quality assurance, regulation of cross border education and other issues of mutual interest, The US approach thus far has been to lobby for liberalisation of the sector. Alienating the Human Resources Ministry may not matter in trade relations, but it will matter in education and knowledge partnerships.

The report shows little understanding of the education sector. It claims that direct investment in education is not allowed in India. This is not really the case as a recent MoU to establish a campus of Georgia Institute of Technology in Andhra Pradesh (near the ISB) demonstrates. Regulation of foreign provision in India is unclear with the relevant legislation frozen in parliament but accreditation can be achieved. The UK’s Huddersfield University has both invested in, and achieved, official recognition of its joint venture in ‘Hospitality Management’ with the Taj Hotel Group in India.

Similarly, the report claims that the higher education sector is overwhelmingly public which is again not the case. Over 50% of higher education provision in India is private and the vast majority of audiences the US would like to address at secondary level will attend private schools which dominate the urban areas. This brings me to a second point.

The ISB example, while interesting, also misses the point raised, as the main way the US can build an educational relationship with India is claimed to be partnership in meeting the training requirements for India’s large population. ISB and similar Tier 1 institutions will never address this demand with their tiny elite intakes. More relevant are the 1800 engineering colleges with Tier 2 aspirations that are currently achieving less than 30% employability according to the IT industry body Nasscom. Here the community colleges and Tier 2 US institutions could play a bigger role (briefly touched upon in the report). And here, also, the private sector becomes very relevant with the enormous number of Tier 2 private institutions springing up all over India.

Finally, the potential of the partnership is less than fully explored here. The US already has a substantial knowledge partnership with India which transcends the main objective in the report; of helping India to produce its next generation workforce. The complex research and innovation links with US through entrepreneurs and highly qualified graduate technicians and scientists are of immense value to both countries but largely ignored in this report. The overall impression is of a hastily prepared report to encourage the new administration to focus on India.

Many of us have wondered what would happen if the sleeping giant awakes and the US take a more pro-active and coherent approach to its knowledge and education partnership with India.This report may be the alarm clock going off..!!

Tim Gore

Seeking new insights on the ‘Evolving Regulatory Context for Private Education in Emerging Economies’

Discourses on private higher education, and the role of private higher education in spurring on the globalization of higher education process, are emerging in a variety of contexts: informal discussions, classrooms, workshops and conferences, publications, protests, websites, and structured and unstructured policy dialogues.

GlobalHigherEd is designed to help shed light on where thinking about the construction of new knowledge spaces takes place, and when possible what the content of such thinking is.

On the former role, it is worth noting that there are some ongoing on-line deliberations between now and 14 November about the “Evolving Regulatory Context for Private Education in Emerging Economies”. The deliberations are being sponsored by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and more specifically the IFC’s EdInvest. The IFC is an institution that is part of the World Bank Group. Our brief entry in October (‘”Frontier markets”, the International Finance Corporation, and development’) explains a little more about the IFC, and provides a variety of links to this increasingly important global higher ed institution.

An introduction to the forum can be found here. The general discussion thread can be accessed by following the link along the right margin to Private Education Forum, or by following this link.

Key questions in the discussion include, according to the IFC:

Week 1 – November 3 to 7: What are the major challenges in regulating private education and how might they be overcome?

Week 2 – November 10 to 14: Should government involve private providers in policy and decision making relating to the role of the private sector? If so, what are the most effective mechanisms for doing this? If not, why not?

The online discussion that is underway now is an outcome of an earlier (May 2008) international conference that was attended by a small group of government representatives, accreditation officials, private providers, and World Bank Group officials. According to Svava Bjarnason, Senior Education Specialist of the IFC, the purpose of the May event was to:

begin a dialogue between the various players concerning how the regulatory context is evolving in relation to private sector providers. At the close of that event we agreed to continue the dialogue and to host an online discussion to engage the wider community in the debate.

This two week long dialogue is underway until 14 November so check it out now if you want to contribute.

Apart from the content, it is worth noting that this IFC-sponsored event, like the broader (more ‘open’) national policy dialogues that have been occurring in Australia and the UK (see our entry ‘Higher education policy-making, stake-holder democracy and the economics of attention’), is an experiment in the use of digital technology to facilitate (it is hoped) debate, innovative thinking, and new insights.  Yet as we noted in our previous entry:

new technologies operate within an ‘economy of attention’ – a point well made by Richard Latham in his influential 2006 book The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information.

Now the essential point Latham is making is that we live in an information economy, and information is not in short supply. In fact, argues Latham, we are “drowning in it”. What is in short supply is ‘attention’! To grab attention, we need stylistic devices and strategies so that what Latham calls ‘stuff’—like debating the future directions for higher education—moves from the periphery to the center of attention.

Thus the IFC’s on-line discussion is worth tuning into and contributing to for obvious content-specific reasons, while the nature of the forum (on-line, open, two weeks long) can also be assessed as a vehicle to enable geographically dispersed voices to engage. The IFC’s hope is, we are guessing, that the discussion enables the generation of some new insights on a topic (the “Evolving Regulatory Context for Private Education in Emerging Economies”) that clearly needs to be thought about, and with considerable care and attention.

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

Kaplan’s importance grows in keeping the Washington Post Company afloat

Further to our 8 April 2008 piece on Kaplan and the Washington Post Company (‘Pulitzer Prizes and the global higher ed industry‘), the news today reinforces the significant role of Kaplan in keeping the Washington Post Company (and its newspaper) afloat.  The press release is here, while a related story in the Washington Post newspaper puts it this way:

The Washington Post Co. today reported an 86 percent decline in third-quarter earnings compared with the same period last year, as a significant loss at the flagship newspaper offset gains at the company’s education and cable divisions.

For the quarter, The Post Co. had net income of $10.3 million ($1.08 per share) on $1.1 billion in revenue, compared with net income of $72.5 million ($7.60) on $1 billion in revenue in 2007.

The company’s newspaper division — which includes The Post, the Everett (Wash.) Herald and several community papers — reported an operating loss of $82.7 million for the quarter, largely resulting from a $59.7 million goodwill impairment charge at the Herald and the small papers, reflecting their diminished value. The loss also includes $12.5 million in accelerated depreciation of The Post’s College Park printing presses….

Kaplan Inc., The Post Co.’s education division, which now provides 53 percent of company revenue, reported $603 million in third-quarter revenue, a 17 percent gain over last year, and $51 million in operating income, a 36 percent gain over the same period last year.

The numbers above, and the Kaplan specific numbers below (from the press release), speak for themselves.

Kris Olds

Demolition precedes construction: clearing space for the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery

Demolition precedes construction: clearing space for the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (2008)

Developments in the world of private for-profit global higher ed

The private for-profit global higher ed world generated three news items of note this morning.

First:

LAUREATE EDUCATION, INC. ACQUIRES LEADING UNIVERSITIES IN MEXICO AND COSTA RICA

Baltimore, Maryland, July 8, 2008 – Laureate Education, Inc. today announced it has acquired the Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC), one of the largest private universities in Mexico, and the Universidad Latina and Universidad Americana (UAM) in Costa Rica.

UNITEC has eight campuses throughout Mexico, including six in Mexico City, one in Guadalajara and one in Monterrey. The university has a 40-year tradition of providing higher education throughout the country, and today serves more than 36,000 students….

Universidad Latina, the largest private university in Costa Rica, was founded in 1989 and has more than 16,000 students. The university is widely recognized for its health sciences programs, including medicine and dentistry. UAM, founded in 1997, has more than 4,000 students, and specializes in business education. Combined, the schools have 13 campuses throughout Costa Rica.

Continue reading here…

Second:

APOLLO GROUP, INC. APPOINTS STRATEGIC AND FINANCIAL ADVISOR CHARLES B. EDELSTEIN AS NEW CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 7, 2008–Apollo Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:APOL) (“Apollo Group,” “Apollo” or “the Company”) today announced the appointment of Charles “Chas” B. Edelstein as Chief Executive Officer and Director, effective August 26, 2008. Apollo’s founder, Dr. John G. Sperling, continues to act as Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors….

Mr. Edelstein, 48, has more than 20 years of experience as a strategic and financial advisor. He joins Apollo Group from Credit Suisse, where he served as a Managing Director and headed the Global Services Group within the Investment Banking Division, as well as the Chicago investment banking office. Mr. Edelstein founded and oversaw Credit Suisse’s leading advisory practice in the education industry, where he served as advisor to many of the largest education companies, including Apollo Group.

Continue reading here…

Finally, the Wall Street Journal noted, today, that Marcus Brauchli, the former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal (now owned by Rupert Murdoch) will become the Washington Post’s new executive editor. The formal press release is here.

Why profile this topic? Recall that the Washington Post, despite its iconic status, is effectively being bankrolled by private for-profit global higher ed (aka Kaplan), as we noted in an entry titled ‘Pulitzer Prizes and the global higher ed industry‘. This point is reinforced in the Wall Street Journal:

But the Post has been struggling with the same forces that have devastated the newspaper industry in recent years — defections of readers and advertisers to the Web. Over the past 24 months, the paper’s weekday circulation has dropped 7.1% to 673,180, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Print-ad revenue fell 13% in 2007, according to the Post. While Washington Post Co. has been somewhat insulated from the impact of these changes by its profitable Kaplan education business, the paper has lately taken steps to cut costs. It eliminated more than 100 newsroom positions, bringing the total newsroom count to about 700 from its peak of more than 900 in 2003. Some staffers worry that further cuts are coming.

These three news items are lenses onto three related development patterns:

• Diversification, dependency, and cross-subsidy via for-profit private higher ed (in the case of Kaplan).
• The extension of private higher ed networks into new ’emerging market’ geographies via the acquisition of private universities (in the case of Laureate).
• Financialization, with institutions of for-profit private higher ed reaching into the calculative networks that enable global higher ed value chains to be designed and brought to life (in the case of Apollo).

Given the scale of education services on offer via Laureate, Apollo, and Kaplan – over 2 million students being served right now – these news items and development patterns are worth taking note of.

Kris Olds

Cisco, KAUST, and Microsoft: hybrid offerings for global higher ed

The globalization of higher education has been going hand in hand with novel experiments in the provision of education services, as well as in the production of knowledge via R&D. These experiments have been enabled by the broad but highly uneven liberalization of regulatory systems, and spurred on by the perception (and sometimes reality) of inadequate levels of state support for higher education and research. A myriad of policies, programs and projects, of an increasingly sophisticated nature, are now bringing many of these experiments to life.

Experimentation is also being facilitated on some traditional public university campuses, with hybrid units in development (e.g., see the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance), offers to select foreign universities to establish a formal presence on another campus (e.g., see this entry regarding the University of Warwick), and even private ‘campuses’ under construction by firms that lease space to mobile higher education service providers (e.g., see this entry on Chaska’s ‘Field of Dreams’).

Over the last few weeks a variety of examples of such institutional experimentation have bubbled up.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

First, the San Jose-based firm, Cisco Systems, Inc., announced that its Networking Academy, which has been in operation since 1997:

has achieved a key milestone with a record 47 percent increase in the total number of students enrolled in Morocco in the past 12 months. Since the program’s inception, this brings the total number of Networking Academy students over 7,500. Each student undergoes a comprehensive technology-based training curriculum that can provide them with skills which they can utilize in their future professional careers.

According to Cisco, its Networking Academy provides educational services in more than 160 countries, reaching 600,000 students per year. The Network Academy topics (e.g., LANs, IT networks, network infrastructure essentials) can be standardized in a relatively easy manner, which enables Cisco to offer the same “high-quality education, supported by online content and assessments, performance tracking, hands-on labs, and interactive learning tools”, across all 160 countries.

And growth is rapid: in Morocco, for example:

The first Networking Academy in Morocco started in Ain Bordja in February 2001, long before Cisco’s office in Morocco was established. Today, the total number of Networking Academies has grown to 39 throughout the entire Kingdom with many more new Academies across Morocco to be announced in the very near future.

Cisco’s growth in providing these education services partly reflects problems in the Moroccan higher education system (see, for example, the World Bank’s 2008 report The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa). It is noteworthy that nearly 1/3 of the students are female; a level of enrollment perceived my most analysts of the region to be significant and positive.

Further information on the Networking Academy is available in this short video clip. This initiative is akin to the Oracle Corporation‘s Oracle Academy, which has “partnered with more than 3,400 institutions and supported 397,000 students across 83 countries“. Today, coincidentally, marks the official opening of the Oracle Academy of the Hanoi University and Hanoi University of Commerce in Vietnam.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Second, over the last week the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), an institution we have profiled several times (see here and here), announced a series of major funding initiatives that will support other universities, around the world, to develop major R&D initiatives. The logic is to kick-start the creation of KAUST’s global networks (recalling that the KAUST campus is only now being built from scratch, as one of many photographs from the KAUST website, conveys).

KAUST’s Global Research Partnership (GRP) will be funding:

• Cornell University’s KAUST Center for Research and Education
  
• University of Oxford’s Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics
• Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics
• Texas A&M University’s Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (IAMCS)

So three American universities, and one UK university. Further information on these centers can be found here.

KAUST also announced that its Center-in-Development scheme (note the in development moniker) will be funding one Saudi, one Asian and one European university in the form of:

• King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals’ (KFUPM) Transformative Research in Petrochemicals and Polymers
• National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Solar Energy Research Center (SERC)
• Utrecht University’s Center for Soil, Water and Coastal Resources (SOWACOR)

Further information on these initiatives can be located here.

Thus we have a Saudi institution, which is really an instantaneously endowed foundation (to the tune of $10 billion), projecting itself out via funded programs, and translating institutional and researcher agendas in key centres of scientific calculation (to use some Latourian phrases), so as to enable itself to morph into a globally recognized, respected, and highly networked science and technology university within five years. Moreover, KAUST is forging ties with other types of knowledge-related institutions, including the US Library of Congress, so as to:

complement its academic and research programs in cutting-edge science and engineering with research and outreach programs aimed at giving students and faculty an appreciation of the rich history of scientific inquiry and discovery in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Microsoft & Cisco

Finally, my own university, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has embarked upon two initiatives that splice together the institutional fabrics of a major public university, and select private sector firms (in software and the life sciences), with both initiatives facilitated by the alumni effect (another topic we have recently written about).

In the first, Seattle-based Microsoft is contributing substantial support to help UW-Madison open the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, which will focus on the advanced development of database systems. As the formal UW-Madison press release notes, this lab is:

helping expand on a highly productive 20-year research and alumni relationship between the company and the University of Wisconsin-Madison computer sciences department.

The Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, named in honor of the Microsoft executive who was a founding father of the database industry, will open in downtown Madison under the direction of UW-Madison emeritus computer sciences professor, and Microsoft Technical Fellow, David DeWitt, one of the world leaders in database research.

“Microsoft is here because we are doing some of the best database work in the world and we have produced scores of graduates who have gone on to successful careers in the industry,” says DeWitt. “Our focus will be on continuing the production of talented graduate students and taking on some of the great challenges in database systems.”

David DeWitt (pictured above) was the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences, though he has now taken up emeritus status to focus on this initiative. Further information on DeWitt and this scheme is available here.

And returning to the Cisco theme, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) sponsored a ground breaking ceremony last Friday for the development of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID), a $150 million project we briefly profiled here. WID is being developed with funding and other forms of support from UW-Madison, WARF, John and Tashia Morgridge (he is the former CEO of Cisco, while she is a former special education teacher), and the State of Wisconsin.

WID will open in 2010, though it is already in action via the efforts of WID’s interim director Marsha Mailick Selzer, and pioneer stem cell researcher, James Thomson. It is worth noting, though, that even the private component of WID (the Morgridge Institute for Research) is not-for-profit. This said the competitive impulse was loud and clear at the opening ceremony, according to the local newspaper reporter that covered the event:

The building will house an ambitious effort by the state to capture what Doyle hopes to be 10 percent of the market in regenerative medicine and stem cell technologies by 2015. The building is the centerpiece of a $750 million inititiave to develop stem cell research and biotechnology in Wisconsin.

So experiments aplenty. Fortunately, from the perspective of 7,500 Moroccan students, and UW-Madison’s researchers, Cisco Kid was a friend of mine (it’s bad, I know :)).

Kris Olds

Pulitzer Prizes and the global higher ed industry

News that the Washington Post‘s excellent journalists just won six Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, including for Public Service, Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, National Reporting, International Reporting, Feature Writing, and Commentary, should serve to remind GlobalHigherEd‘s readers that the Washington Post Company is being bankrolled by Kaplan, by far the Post’s most profitable unit. Kaplan, for those of you who do not know, is a global education company, with approximately 50% of its revenue derived from the higher ed sector. It serves over 1,000,000 students per year in over 600 locations, and employs 27,000 staff according to Kaplan sources. The numbers below speak for themselves:

And in the Washington Post Company 2007 Annual Report, the company had this to say “to our shareholders”:

At The Washington Post Company, every single one of our businesses has dramatically changed over the past 15 years. In some cases, the changes were for the better.

Fifteen years ago we were accurately described as a media company. Over that time Kaplan has grown into a powerhouse, a multidisciplinary and increasingly international education business unlike any other education company in the world. For the last six months of the year, Kaplan’s revenue was almost half of the company’s, at 49%. Kaplan will continue to grow stronger in 2008. The Washington Post Company is now an education and media company (this isn’t “re-branding”; it’s reality), and the accent on education could get a lot stronger in the future.

On the media side, the financial and operational results at Cable ONE have been exceptional. Profits have bounded up during years when not all cable companies have performed as well. Customer service is at an all-time high in an industry not known for that quality.

Elsewhere in the company, the news is not as good.

This is a further sign of the increasingly significant role of private for-profit education at a global scale, and how higher education companies are perceived to be partial counter-cyclical mediators for revenue and profitability. However such trends cannot help but lead to the reallocation of capital away from the media (even despite such prestigious prizes), and towards education, at an intra-firm level.

Kris Olds

Mobile educational spaces: from Chaska’s Field of Dreams to Zaha’s nomad structure

The blurring of institutional boundaries via the establishment of international joint and dual/double degree programs, the opening up of branch campuses, the creation of hybrid spaces (of an interdisciplinary and a public/private nature), the operation of base campus affiliated overseas colleges, invitations to open up overseas bases within the confines of another campus, and the like, are but signs that higher education is becoming a very unsettled sector. Staid and conservative for the most, change is underway, and for a wide variety of reasons.

Education Futures’ profile of “EdCampus” in Chaska, Minnesota, reinforces this point. Their informative entry, which draws upon a local Minnesotan newspaper, highlights a new university campus owned by one company, but associated with no particular university. As the source newspaper article puts it:

The novelty lies in the “Field of Dreams” approach of the company developing the EdCampus: If you build it, they will come.

The company plans to erect classrooms as shells, line up higher education institutions as tenants to fill them, then customize the rooms for satellite classes or lectures offered by as many colleges and universities as it can line up.

“They could lease space to anyone from Harvard to North Dakota State,” Chaska Mayor Gary Van Eyll said.

And the Chaska Herald newspaper writes that:

“EdCampus Twin Cities,” as it is being called, will “leverage the power of combining dynamic students from diverse institutions, backgrounds and disciplines into a single campus – outfitted with the best available technology, customizable classroom space, and student-centric services,” according to promotional material….

The project is estimated to cost $88 million to build. It would include 125 “custom classroom environments” spread across 225,000 square feet. An additional 115,000 square feet would provide space for student services, retail, corporate training spaces, lecture space and administrative offices.

“It will have everything a college campus would have,” said Pokorney. “But no football team.”

When complete, EdCampus could serve up to 6,500 students in addition to employing 200 professional and support staff. It is estimated that EdCampus could bring in nearly $100 million in annual revenues.

As Education Futures notes, this model negates the territorial imperative associated with most universities, for even the most global of universities still devotes a significant amount of effort to enhancing developmental ties to the local community. In this case, though, this is likely to be a mere service centre; a knowledge space akin to a motorway (freeway) rest stop for commuter students eager to acquire degrees, while dropping a few dollars here and there (“annual revenues”?) via consumption practices, and some streams of property tax income.

If this model can turn a higher education system on its head, then perhaps future scenarios will see universities adopting the contemporary mobile art container model currently on offer in Hong Kong. The design intelligentsia’s favorite architect – Zaha Hadid – has created a large mobile art complex (web cam shots below at dawn on 26 March) that is being moved between Hong Kong, London, New York, Moscow, and Paris.

This travelling pavilion houses an art exhibition made up of the work of 20 artists. A nomadic structure moving across global space; a museum that travels; innovative space for the the transmission of ideas and the cultivation of knowledge. Will the day come when we see a Zaha Hadid-designed mobile university campus, on permanent move between cities around the world, resplendent in its role as a space for the production of ever more global forms of knowledge and subjectivities? Far fetched, to be sure, and a quality assurance nightmare, but who would have thought “EdCampus” would ever be dreamt up in the Fargoesque landscape of Minnesota?!

Kris Olds

The ‘European Quality Assurance Register’ for higher education: from networks to hierarchy?

Quality assurance has been an important global dialogue, with quality assurance agencies embedded in the fabric of the global higher education landscape. These agencies are mostly made up of a network of nationally-located institutions, for example the Nordic Quality Assurance Network in Higher Education, or the US-based Council for Higher Education Accrediation.

Since the early 1990s, we have seen the development of regional and global networks of agencies, for instance the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, and the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education which in 2007 boasted full membership from 136 organizations from 74 countries. Such networks both drive and produce processes of globalization and regionalization.

The emergence of ‘registers’–of the kind announced today with the launch of the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR) by the E4 Group(ESU, The European University Association – EUA, The European Association of Institutions in Higher Education – EURASHE, The European Network of Quality Assurance Agencies – ENQA) – signals a rather different kind of ‘globalising’ development in the sector. In short we might see it as a move from a network of agencies to a register that acts to regulate the sector. It also signals a further development in the creation of a European higher education industry.

So, what will the EQAR to do? According to EQAR, its role is to

…provide clear and reliable information on the quality assurance agencies (QAAs) operating in Europe: this is a list of agencies that substantially comply with the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG) as adopted by the European ministers of higher education in Bergen 2005.

The Register is expected to:

• promote student mobility by providing a basis for the increase of trust among higher education institutions;
• reduce opportunities for “accreditation mills” to gain credibility;
• provide a basis for governments to authorize higher educations institutions to choose any agency from the Register, if that is compatible with national arrangements;
• provide a means for higher education institutions to choose between different agencies, if that is compatible with national arrangements; and
• serve as an instrument to improve the quality of education.

All Quality Assurance Agencies that comply with the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance will feature on the register, with compliance secured through an external review process.

There will also be a Register Committee – an independent body comprising of 11 quality assurance experts, nominated by European stakeholder organisations. This committee will decide on the inclusion of the quality assurance agencies. The EQAR association, that operates the Register, will be managed by an Executive Board, composed of E4 representatives, and a Secretariat.

The ‘register’ not only formalises and institutionalises a new layer of quality assurance, but it generates a regulatory hierarchy over and above other public and private regulatory agencies. It also is intended to ensure the development of a European higher education industry with the stamp of regulatory approval to provide important information in the global marketplace.

Susan Robertson

Private Canadian education firm buys community college and expands existing links with China

As recently reported in the Vancouver Sun, a large Vancouver-based private company called CIBT Education Group has bought Sprott Shaw Community College – the oldest and largest private community college in Western Canada. Established in 1994, CIBT Education Group runs a number of post-secondary schools in China, providing both academic programmes and vocational training.

Sprott Shaw Community College, originating in Vancouver, has grown over the last years to include 20 locations across the province of British Columbia, training 4, 500 students each year with the aim of preparing them for successful employment. CIBT Education Group intends to export Sprott Shaw Community College’s vocational programmes to China. According to Toby Chu, Vice Chairman, President and CEO of CIBT, “over 250 million workers from rural China are gradually migrating to the coastal and urban cities of China in search of better paying jobs to improve their standard of living. These workers will require extensive vocational re-training or career enhancing skills in order to secure better paying jobs in China’s modern and rapidly advancing economy. With 104 years of operating experience and over 140 additional career, vocational and degree granting programs available to us, this expansive network of supporting infrastructure, teaching resources, knowledge and experience provided in this transaction with Sprott-Shaw Community College adds tremendous value to CIBT Schools in China and our overall business.” CIBT managers based in China will ‘repackage’ Sprott Shaw’s programmes for a specifically Chinese market.

As has been observed before on GlobalHigherEd, China offers a huge potential market in higher and further education. CIBT Education Groups notes in a recent Executive Summary that with 320 million students in 1.35 million schools China has the largest education system in the world. However, it is unable to meet the demand in higher education (with only 1.3% of the population currently enrolled in university compared to 5.4% of the population in the US). According to CIBT, an additional 20 million people are seeking vocational training.

At the same time as providing educational places in China, the programmes proposed by CIBT will also initiate flows of Chinese students into the Canadian education system. CIBT runs four-year courses, of which students spend two years ‘overseas’. This new initiative will direct students to British Columbia for two years of their four-year course. The practice of sending Chinese students to overseas institutions is already established by CIBT. The company has ‘credit transfer agreements’ with universities in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the UK, which enable Chinese students to transfer credits earned at CIBT institutions in China to these overseas ‘academic partners’ – thereby receiving a valuable overseas degree at the end of their course.

This is a further example of Canadian firms seeking to ‘do business’ in China. In 2007, CIBT was named in a report by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada as a case study of Canadian companies that have developed successful ‘Asian strategies’. CIBT has also established partnerships with large private education providers in the US, such as Western International University and WyoTech. In the next two years, the Group plans to build 40 new Education Centres in 40 different Chinese cities located within existing colleges or universities. It also has plans to acquire other state-owned colleges and to transform them into ‘private business colleges’.

Johanna Waters

McDonalds to offer its own nationally-recognised qualifications in the UK

While GlobalHigherEd‘s focus is on higher education, there are major developments afoot in the UK’s post-16 sector that are worth drawing attention to because of the knock-on implications for the UK’s higher education system.

Today a BBC report stated that the Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) in the UK had just announced that the fast food giant – McDonalds, along with Airline Flybe and Network Rail – would become one of the first set of private firms in the UK to offer their own nationally-recognized qualifications – up to A-Level standard. The BBC reported that McDonalds regarded this as “an important and exciting new step for the company” whilst the Minister in charge of this initiative – John Denham – stated that:

…this is an important step toward ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications…

For those of you who don’t know the UK system well, A-levels subjects are those studied for university entrance. To date, schools and colleges have been the only providers of A-level courses, and these are regulated through systems of professional training, inspection and assessment.

There is little detail yet available on how these new education providers – McDonald’s, Network Rail and Airline Flybe – will be regulated or how the training itself will be funded (government?). What we do know, however, is that the course content will be tailored to the training needs of the firm, and that the focus will be on workplace skills rather than broader competencies that might develop the whole person.

These new qualifications will face some hostility from the university sector. The BBC report notes (following interviews with 10 university admissions tutors from leading universities) that some universities are already stating they would not accept students who have taken these diplomas.

Nor are the  teaching unions happy about this, according to the Financial Times – with Chris Keates, general secretary of NASUWT arguing:

It is a huge mistake to allow McDonald’s, with its poor track record of employment practice and anti-trade union attitude, to pioneer private sector provision of training.”

There are also industry-based training issues facing this new qualifications venture, as this Financial Times report pointed out:

One independent industry analyst acknowledged national accreditation would increase recognition of McDonald’s qualifications among other employers in the “hospitality industry”. But he said a McDonald’s qualification would not be useful throughout the sector. The skills required in “a high-class restaurant”, including “the etiquette and serving techniques, are quite different.

Today’s announcement by QCA – which essentially amounts to opening up ‘the education system’ to new players in the field – should be seen as part of wider deregulatory trends in the UK education scene. In 2007 GlobalHigherEd reported on a Privy Council decision to give BPP Holdings plc (BPP), Europe’s leading provider of professional education, degree awarding powers. As we noted at the time, not only did this give a for-profit private sector company permission to enter a very substantial and profitable market, but it had the right to award a qualification that has been the preserve of so called proper ‘universities’ . It is also worth noting that this initiative is in alignment with changes to the regulatory system in other countries including Australia. As the Financial Times noted today:

A skills expert in Whitehall said that by giving awarding power to large employers, England was moving into line with other rich countries such as Australia – where Coles, the huge supermarket chain, has a large nationally accredited programme.

The QCA’s policy decision – to let firms like McDonalds award an A-level qualification – will surely present employers and universities with some interesting challenges about how these are to be treated. Like the Privy Council’s decision, it may well be looked back upon as a watershed moment in the governance of the ‘education system’ in the UK.

Susan Robertson