OECD

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A New Academic Year Begins

Well, I survived the first week of the 2012-2013 academic year as new department chairperson, as well as the near doubling of student numbers in my new (as of 2011) online course (Geography 340 — World Regions in Global Context).  The experience of creating an online course from scratch has been a fascinating one; a form of ‘learning while doing’ that I highly recommend. The experience reinforced the point made in many reports and articles that it takes on average three times as much effort and money to create a new online course, and that they require a lot of ongoing effort to run if you want students to be engaged and actually learn. I’m also curious, after the last 1.5 years of working on this, how many of the ‘disruptive innovation’ propagandists have ever taught an online course, or run an online education program.  Not many, I would wager.

The prior week included a great half-day event for department chairs, center directors, deans, etc., at UW-Madison deemed the ‘Leadership Summit.’ The event kicked off when our Interim Chancellor, David Ward (and former president of the American Council on Education) gave a fantastic context-oriented talk about the past, present and future of public higher education. David Ward has a unique ability to be analytical but also identify challenges and opportunities that are tangible and can be worked with. There aren’t many people who can be critical about how we are still trapped in many “Victorian-” and “Edwardian-era” structures and assumptions (e.g., the timetable), while at the same time flag how we are making progress on a number of fronts and we have some real opportunities to keep the ‘public’ in public higher education. It’s hard for me to summarize all of the points of his talk, but suffice it to say Ward was implying educators need to be both more aware of the structural changes underway in higher education (including outside the U.S.), but at the same time we have no choice but to rely on ourselves to fashion realistic solutions to the stress-points that exist. In short, the pendulum has fallen off the pin that enabled cyclical change for decades past, and we’re shifting into a very different era; one with no explicit social compact about the ideal balance of public and private support for the U.S. higher education system. Ward is too experienced and smart to latch onto the ‘disruptive innovation’ hype circulating through U.S. universities right now, and instead advocates bottom-up forms of education innovation that we, as faculty and staff, delineate and push forward.

Besides these start-of-term reflections, I also wanted to inform readers of GlobalHigherEd that my May 2012 entry titled ‘International Consortia of Universities and the Mission/Activities Question‘ has just been updated.  Representatives of several consortia that were not flagged in the original entry contacted me so I’ve added them the long list of consortia in the latter half of the entry. Debates continue in internationalization circles about the efficacy of international consortia of universities and this entry is designed to provide some food for fodder to further these debates.

Finally, I wanted to let you know that one of the OECD’s flagship reports — Education at a Glance 2012: OECD indicators — will be released this coming Tuesday and I’ve got an embargoed copy that is chock-a-block full of insights. I am working up a new entry about the 2012 report that is modeled, to a degree, on my September 2011 entry titled ‘International student mobility highlights in the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011.’ If I can hide behind my office door for some of Monday I’ll post the new entry on Tuesday (or Wednesday at the latest).

Best wishes at the start of the new academic year (at least here in North America)!

Kris Olds

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On being seduced by The World University Rankings (2011-12)

Well, it’s ranking season again, and the Times Higher Education/Thomson Reuters World University Rankings (2011-2012) has just been released. The outcome is available here, and a screen grab of the Top 25 universities is available to the right. Link here for a pre-programmed Google News search for stories about the topic, and link here for Twitter-related items (caught via the #THEWUR hash tag).

Polished up further after some unfortunate fall-outs from last year, this year’s outcome promises to give us an all improved, shiny and clean result. But is it?

Like many people in the higher education sector, we too are interested in the ranking outcomes, not that there are many surprises, to be honest.

Rather, what we’d like to ask our readers to reflect on is how the world university rankings debate is configured. Configuration elements include:

  • Ranking outcomes: Where is my university, or the universities of country X, Y, and Z, positioned in a relative sense (to other universities/countries; to peer universities/countries; in comparison to last year; in comparison to an alternative ranking scheme)?
  • Methods: Is the adopted methodology appropriate and effective? How has it changed? Why has it changed?
  • Reactions: How are key university leaders, or ministers (and equivalents) reacting to the outcomes?
  • Temporality: Why do world university rankers choose to release the rankings on an annual basis when once every four or five years is more appropriate (given the actual pace of change within universities)? How did they manage to normalize this pace?
  • Power and politics: Who is producing the rankings, and how do they benefit from doing so? How transparent are they themselves about their operations, their relations (including joint ventures), their biases, their capabilities?
  • Knowledge production: As is patently evident in our recent entry ‘Visualizing the uneven geographies of knowledge production and circulation,’ there is an incredibly uneven structure to the production of knowledge, including dynamics related to language and the publishing business.  Given this, how do world university rankings (which factor in bibliometrics in a significant way) reflect this structural condition?
  • Governance matters: Who is governing whom? Who is being held to account, in which ways, and how frequently? Are the ranked capable of doing more than acting as mere providers of information (for free) to the rankers? Is an effective mechanism needed for regulating rankers and the emerging ranking industry? Do university leaders have any capability (none shown so far!) to collaborate on ranking governance matters?
  • Context(s): How do schemes like the THE’s World University Rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and the QS World University Rankings, relate to broader attempts to benchmark higher education systems, institutions, and educational and research practices or outcomes? And here we flag the EU’s new U-Multirank scheme, and the OECD’s numerous initiatives (e.g., AHELO) to evaluate university performance globally, as well as engender debate about benchmarking too. In short, are rankings like the ones just released ‘fit for purpose’ in genuinely shed light on the quality, relevance and efficiency of higher education in a rapidly-evolving global context?

The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don’t be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.

Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).

Is it not time to think more broadly, and critically, about the big issues related to the great ranking seduction?

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

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‘Hotspots’ and international scientific collaboration

The OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and Growth in Knowledge Economies report was released on 20 September.  While I’ve only seen the summary (which is the source for the first three images below) and an informative entry (‘A Changing Landscape: University hotspots for science and technology‘) in the OECD’s Education Today weblog, it is interesting to see a now common pattern and message emerging in these types of reports, and in a series of like-minded conferences, workshops, and associated reports (e.g. the Royal Society’s excellent Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century, March 2011):

(a) relative stasis or decline in the OECD member countries (though they still do dominate, and will for decades to come);

(b) relatively fast growth within the so-called BRIC countries; and

(c) increased international collaboration, both as outcome and as aspiration.

And it is the aspiration for international collaboration that is particularly fascinating to ponder, for these types of scoreboards — analytical benchmarking cum geostrategic reframing exercises really — help produce insights on the evolving ‘lie of the land,’ while also flagging the ideal target spaces (countries, regions, institutions) for prospective future collaboration. National development processes and patterns thus drive change, but they interact in fascinating ways with the international collaborative process, which drives more international collaboration, and on it goes. As Alessandra Colecchia of the OECD puts it:

What does this [the changing landscape, and emerging ‘hotspots’] mean and why is it important? As students and researchers become more mobile, new sets of elite universities outside of the US could materialize. Whether or not we call it the “Banyan” or “Bonsai” League is yet to be determined, but it is clear that OECD countries may no longer have the monopoly on scientific excellence in higher education.

Luckily for us, education is generally not a zero-sum game. When others gain important insights and breakthroughs in science and technology, the entire field benefits. So wherever you are in the world, you can wear your college sweatshirt with pride.

True, though questions remain about the principles/missions/agendas driving international collaboration. For example, there is an ongoing scramble in Europe and North America to link up with research-active Brazilian institutions of higher education; an issue nicely summarized in today’s OBHE story titled ‘Brazil leads the charge from Latin America.’

As noted in the fourth image below (which was extracted from the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century), the nature of coauthor-based collaboration with Brazil is changing, with some countries edging closer because scholar-to-scholar ties are deepening or thinning. The reconfiguration is most likely deepening from 2008 on as a slew of new policies, programs and projects get promoted and funded in both Brazil and actual or potential partner countries.

Some of the questions that come to my mind, after participating in some workshops where relations with Brazil are discussed include:

  • What values drive these new initiatives to reach out across space into and out of Brazil?
  • What disciplines are factored in (or not), and what types of researchers (junior? senior? elite? emerging?) get supported?
  • What languages are they dependent upon, and what languages will they indirectly promote?
  • Are these international collaboration drives built on the principle of ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link’ (i.e. an exclusive one), or are they attendant to the need for capacity building and longer time horizons for knowledge development?
  • Are these international collaboration drives built upon implicit and explicit principles of reciprocity, or otherwise?
  • What about the territorial dimensions of the development process? Will we see hotspot to ’emerging hotspot’ linkages deepen, or will hotspots be linked up with non-hotspots and if so how, and why? Can an archipelago-like landscape of linked up hotspots ‘serve’ nations/regions/the world, or is it generative of exclusionary developmental tendencies?

These are but a few of many questions to ponder as we observe, and jointly construct, emerging ‘hotspots’ in the global higher education and research landscape.

Kris Olds

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Note: the first three images were extracted from the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and Growth in Knowledge Economies (Sept 2011). The fourth image was extracted from the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century (March 2011).

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International student mobility highlights in the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011

Education at a Glance 2011 was released today by the OECD. The report is replete with data about education systems, patterns, trends, etc., and is well worth reading.

Free copies of the full report (497 pp) and the highlights version (98 pp) are available in PDF format via the links I provided in this sentence.  An on-line summary is available here too, with links to country notes for Brazil  (in English; in Portuguese, Chile, Estonia, France (in French), Germany (in English; in German), Greece, Italy (in English; in Italian), Japan (in English, in Japanese), Korea, Mexico (in English; in Spanish), Spain (in English; in Spanish), and the United Kingdom.

While all of the sections are worth reading, I always find the data regarding international student mobility too hard to resist glancing at when the report first comes out. These six graphics, and associated highlights (all but the first extracted from the highlights version of Education at a Glance 2011) will give you a flavour of some of the noteworthy student mobility trends.  Further details regarding mobility trends and patterns can be found in the full report (pp. 318-339).

How many students study abroad?

  • In 2009, almost 3.7 million tertiary students were enrolled outside their country of citizenship, representing an increase of more than 6% on the previous year.
  • Just over 77% of students worldwide who study abroad do so in OECD countries.
  • In absolute terms, the largest numbers of international students are from China, India and Korea. Asians account for 52% of all students studying abroad worldwide.

 Where do students go to study abroad?

  • Six countries – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States – hosted more than half of the world’s students who studied abroad in 2009.
  • The United States saw a significant drop as a preferred destination of foreign students between 2000 and 2009, falling from about 23% of the global market share to 18%.
  • The shares of foreign students who chose Australia and New Zealand as their destination grew by almost 2%, as did that in the Russian Federation, which has become an important new player on the international education market.

How many international students stay on in the host country?

  • Several OECD countries have eased their immigration policies to encourage the temporary or permanent immigration of international students, including Australia, Canada, Finland, France, New Zealand and Norway.
  • Many students move under a free-movement regime, such as the European Union, and do not need a residence permit to remain in their country of study.
  • On average, 25% of international students who did not renew their student permits changed their student status in the host country mainly for work-related reasons.

Other complementary reports released over the last month include:

The reworking of the global higher education landscape continues to generate a wide array of ripple effects at a range of scales (from the local through to the global). While not perfect, the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance 2011 does an excellent job providing much of the available data on these trends, and on a wide array of issues and phenomenon that help to shape these mobility outcomes. A comparative perspective, after all, helps to flag the place of individual countries’ in the broader and ever evolving landscape; a landscape that countries play a significant role in both constructing, and reacting to.

Kris Olds

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Global regionalism, interregionalism, and higher education

The development of linkages between higher education systems in a variety of ‘world regions’ continues apace. Developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Gulf, and Latin America, albeit uneven in nature, point to the desire to frame and construct regional agendas and architectures. Regionalism -– a state-led initiative to enhance integration to boost trade and security — is now being broadened out such that higher education, and research in some cases, is being uplifted into the regionalism impulse/dynamic.

The incorporation of higher education and research into the regionalism agenda is starting to generate various forms of interregionalisms as well.  What I mean by this is that once a regional higher education area or research area has been established, at least partially, relations between that region, and other regions (i.e. partners), then come to be sought after. These may take the form of relations between (a) regions (e.g., Europe and Asia), (b) a region and components of another region (e.g., Europe and Brazil; Latin America and the United States; Southeast Asia and Australia). The dynamics of how interregional relations are formed are best examined via case studies for, suffice it to say, not all regions are equals, and nor do regions (or indeed countries) speak with singular and stable voices. Moreover some interregional relations can be practice-oriented, and involve informal sharing of best practices that might not formally be ‘on the books.’

Let me outline two examples of the regionalism/interregionalism dynamic below.

ALFA PUENTES

The first example comes straight from an 8 July 2011 newsletter from the European University Association (EUA), one of the most active and effective higher education institutions forging interregional relations of various sorts.

In their newsletter article, the EUA states (and I quote at length):

The harmonisation agenda in Central America: ALFA PUENTES sub-regional project launch (July 07, 2011)

 EUA, OBREAL, HRK and university association partners from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Mexico gathered in Guatemala City on 27-28 June both to discuss and formally launch the sub-regional project ‘Towards a qualifications framework for MesoAmerica’, one of the three pillars of the European Commission supported structural project ‘ALFA PUENTES’ which EUA is coordinating.

Hosted by sub-regional project coordinator CSUCA (Consejo Universitario CentroAmericana), and further attended by the sub-regional coordinators of the Andean Community (ASCUN), Mercosur (Grupo Montevideo), partners discussed current higher education initiatives in Central America and how the ALFA PUENTES project can both support and build upon them.

CSUCA, created in 1948 with a mission to further integration in Central America and improve the quality of higher education in the region, has accelerated its agenda over the past 10 years and recently established a regional accreditation body. This endeavour has been facilitated by project partner and EUA member HRK (in conjunction with DAAD) as well as several other donors. The association, which represents around 20 public universities in Central America, has an ambitious agenda to create better transparency and harmonisation of degrees, and has already agreed to a common definition of credit points and a template for a diploma supplement.

Secretary General Dr Juan Alfonso Fuentes Soria stated in a public presentation of the project that ALFA PUENTES will be utilised to generate a discussion on qualifications frameworks and how this may accelerate the Central America objectives of degree convergence. European experience via the Bologna Process will be shared and European project partners as well as Latin American (LA) partners from other regions will contribute expertise and good practice.

ALFA PUENTES is a three-year project aimed at both supporting Latin American higher education convergence processes and creating deeper working relationships between European and Latin American university associations. Thematic sub-regional projects (MesoAmerica, Andean Community and Mercosur) will be connected with a series of transversal activities including a pan-Latin American survey on change forces in higher education, as well as two large Europe-LA University Association Conferences (2012 and 2014).

This lengthy quote captures a fascinating array of patterns and processes that are unfolding right now; some unique to Europe, some unique to Latin America, and some reflective of synergy and complementarities between these two world regions.

TUNING the Americas

The second example, one more visual in nature, consists of a recent map we created about the export of the TUNING phenomenon. As we have noted in two previous GlobalHigherEd entries:

TUNING is a process launched in Europe to help build the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). As noted on the key TUNING website, TUNING is designed to:

Contribute significantly to the elaboration of a framework of comparable and compatible qualifications in each of the (potential) signatory countries of the Bologna process, which should be described in terms of workload, level, learning outcomes, competences and profile.

The TUNING logic is captured nicely by this graphic from page 15 of the TUNING General Brochure.

Over time, lessons learned about integration and educational reform via these types of mechanisms/technologies of governance have come to be viewed with considerable interest in other parts of the world, including Africa, North America, and Latin America. In short, the TUNING approach, an element of the building of the EHEA, has come to receive considerable attention in non-European regions that are also seeking to guide their higher educational reform processes, and as well as (in many cases) region-building processes.

As is evident in one of several ‘TUNING Americas’ maps we (Susan Robertson, Thomas Muhr, and myself) are working on with the support of the UW-Madison Cartography Lab and the WUN, the TUNING approach is being taken up in other world regions, sometimes with the direct support of the European Commission (e.g., in Latin America or Africa). The map below is based on data regarding the institutional take-up of TUNING as of late 2010.


Please note that this particular map only focuses on Europe and the Americas, and it leaves out other countries and world regions. However, the image pasted in below, which was extracted from a publicly available presentation by Robert Wagenaar of the University of Groningen, captures aspects of TUNING’s evolving global geography.

Despite the importance of EU largesse and support, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the EU is foisting TUNING on world regions; this is the post-colonial era, after all, and regions are voluntarily working with this European-originated reform mechanism and Europe-based actors. TUNING also only works when faculty/staff members in higher education institutions outside of Europe drive and then implement the process (a point Robert Wagenaar emphasizes). Or look, for example, at the role of the US-based Lumina Foundation in its TUNING USA initiative. Instead, what we seem to have is capacity building, mutual interests in the ‘competencies’ and ‘learning outcomes’ agenda, and aspects of the best practices phenomenon (all of which help explain the ongoing building of synergy between the OECD’s AHELO initiative with the European/EU-enabled TUNING initiative). This said, there are some ongoing debates about the possible alignment implications associated with the TUNING initiative.

These are but two examples of many emerging regionalisms/interregionalisms in the global higher education landscape; a complicated multiscalar phenomenon of educational reform and ‘modernization,’ and region building, mixed in with some fascinating cases of relational identity formation at the regional scale.

Kris Olds (with thanks to Susan Robertson & Thomas Muhr)

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The OECD’s AHELO: a PISA for higher education?

Editor’s note: greetings from Paris, one of the ‘calculative centres’ associated with the globalization of higher education.  One of the key institutions associated with this development process is the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OECD/OCDE) given its work on higher education, as well as on related issues such as innovation, science and technology, and so on.

See below for a recent presentation about the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. This presentation is courtesy of Diane Lalancette, an Analyst with the AHELO initiative, OECD – Directorate for Education.

In ‘tweeting‘ about this presentation a few weeks ago, I detected that a few people sent it on while calling AHELO “a PISA for higher education”. PISA, for those of you who don’t know, is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, hence the PISA acronym. As the OECD puts it:

PISA assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society. In all cycles, the domains of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy are covered not merely in terms of mastery of the school curriculum, but in terms of important knowledge and skills needed in adult life.

Yet as Diane Lalancette put it (in a note to me):

While AHELO takes a similar approach to PISA in that it will assess student knowledge and skills directly, it is a feasibility study and will not provide information at national or system level like PISA does.

In short, the focus of the AHELO learning outcomes measures will be at the level of institutions and will not allow for comparisons at national levels, one of the key elements that can put national governments on edge (depending on how well their compulsory education systems do in a relative sense).

Our thanks to the Diane Lalancette and Richard Yelland of the OECD’s Directorate of Education for permission to post the presentation below.

Kris Olds

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OECD launches first global assessment of higher education learning outcomes

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

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

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OECD launches first global assessment of higher education learning outcomes

1/27/2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Bianca Soucek

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

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

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

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

When faced with…

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

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

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

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

Susan Robertson

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From rhetoric to reality: unpacking the numbers and practices of global higher ed

ihepnov2009Numbers, partnerships, linkages, and collaboration: some key terms that seem to be bubbling up all over the place right now.

On the numbers front, the ever active Cliff Adelman released, via the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), a new report titled The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight (November 2009). As the IHEP press release notes:

The research report, The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight, reveals that U.S. graduation rates remain comparable to those of other developed countries despite news stories about our nation losing its global competitiveness because of slipping college graduation rates. The only major difference—the data most commonly highlighted, but rarely understood—is the categorization of graduation rate data. The United States measures its attainment rates by “institution” while other developed nations measure their graduation rates by “system.”

The main target audience of this new report seems to be the OECD, though we (as users) of international higher ed data can all benefit from a good dig through the report. Adelman’s core objective is facilitating the creation of a new generation of indicators, indicators that are a lot more meaningful and policy-relevant than those that currently exist.

Second, Universities UK (UUK) released a data-laden report titled The impact of universities on the UK economy. As the press release notes:

Universities in the UK now generate £59 billion for the UK economy putting the higher education sector ahead of the agricultural, advertising, pharmaceutical and postal industries, according to new figures published today.

This is the key finding of Universities UK’s latest UK-wide study of the impact of the higher education sector on the UK economy. The report – produced for Universities UK by the University of Strathclyde – updates earlier studies published in 1997, 2002 and 2006 and confirms the growing economic importance of the sector.

The study found that, in 2007/08:

  • The higher education sector spent some £19.5 billion on goods and services produced in the UK.
  • Through both direct and secondary or multiplier effects this generated over £59 billion of output and over 668,500 full time equivalent jobs throughout the economy. The equivalent figure four years ago was nearly £45 billion (25% increase).
  • The total revenue earned by universities amounted to £23.4 billion (compared with £16.87 billion in 2003/04).
  • Gross export earnings for the higher education sector were estimated to be over £5.3 billion.
  • The personal off-campus expenditure of international students and visitors amounted to £2.3 billion.

Professor Steve Smith, President of Universities UK, said: “These figures show that the higher education sector is one of the UK’s most valuable industries. Our universities are unquestionably an outstanding success story for the economy.

See pp 16-17 regarding a brief discussion of the impact of international student flows into the UK system.

These two reports are interesting examples of contributions to the debate about the meaning and significance of higher education vis a vis relative growth and decline at a global scale, and the value of a key (ostensibly under-recognized) sector of the national (in this case UK) economy.

And third, numbers, viewed from the perspectives of pattern and trend identification, were amply evident in a new Thomson Reuters’ report (CHINA: Research and Collaboration in the New Geography of Science) co-authored by the data base crunchers from Evidence Ltd., a Leeds-based firm and recent Thomson Reuters acquisition. One valuable aspect of this report is that it unpacks the broad trends, and flags key disciplinary and institutional geographies to China’s new geography of science. As someone who worked at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for four years, I can understand why NUS is now China’s No.1 institutional collaborator (see p. 9), though the why issues are not discussed in this type of broad mapping cum PR report for Evidence & Thomson Reuters.

Table4

Shifting tack, two new releases about international double and joint degrees — one (The Graduate International Collaborations Project: A North American Perspective on Joint and Dual Degree Programs) by the North American Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), and one (Joint and Double Degree Programs: An Emerging Model for Transatlantic Exchange) by the International Institute for Education (IIE) and the Freie Universität Berlin — remind us of the emerging desire to craft more focused, intense and ‘deep’ relations between universities versus the current approach which amounts to the promiscuous acquisition of hundreds if not thousands of memoranda of understanding (MoUs).

IIEFUBcoverThe IIE/Freie Universität Berlin book (link here for the table of contents) addresses various aspects of this development process:

The book seeks to provide practical recommendations on key challenges, such as communications, sustainability, curriculum design, and student recruitment. Articles are divided into six thematic sections that assess the development of collaborative degree programs from beginning to end. While the first two sections focus on the theories underpinning transatlantic degree programs and how to secure institutional support and buy-in, the third and fourth sections present perspectives on the beginning stages of a joint or double degree program and the issue of program sustainability. The last two sections focus on profiles of specific transatlantic degree programs and lessons learned from joint and double degree programs in the European context.

It is clear that international joint and double degrees are becoming a genuine phenomenon; so much so that key institutions including the IIE, the CGS, and the EU are all paying close attention to the degrees’ uses, abuses, and efficacy. Thus we should view this new book as an attempt to both promote, but in a manner that examines the many forces that shape the collaborative process across space and between institutions. International partnerships are not simple to create, yet they are being demanded by more and more stakeholders.  Why?  Dissatisfaction that the rhetoric of ‘internationalization’ does not match up to the reality, and there is a ‘deliverables’ problem.

Indeed, we hosted some senior Chinese university officials here in Madison several months ago and they used the term “ghost MoUs”, reflecting their dissatisfaction with filling filing cabinet after filing cabinet with signed MoUs that lead to absolutely nothing. In contrast, engagement via joint and double degrees, for example, or other forms of partnership (e.g., see International partnerships: a legal guide for universities), cannot help but deepen the level of connection between institutions of higher education on a number of levels. It is easy to ignore a MoU, but not so easy to ignore a bilateral scheme with clearly defined deliverables, a timetable for assessment, and a budget.

AlQudsBrandeisThe value of tangible forms of international collaboration was certainly on view when I visited Brandeis University earlier this week.  Brandeis’ partnership with Al-Quds University (in Jerusalem) links “an Arab institution in Jerusalem and a Jewish-sponsored institution in the United States in an exchange designed to foster cultural understanding and provide educational opportunities for students, faculty and staff.”  Projects undertaken via the partnership have included administrative exchanges, academic exchanges, teaching and learning projects, and partnership documentation (an important but often forgotten about activity). The level of commitment to the partnership at Brandeis was genuinely impressive.

In the end, as debates about numbers, rankings, partnerships, MoUs — internationalization more generally — show us, it is only when we start grinding through the details and ‘working at the coal face’ (like Brandeis and Al-Quds seem to be doing), though in a strategic way, can we really shift from rhetoric to reality.

Kris Olds

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Collapsing branch campuses: time for some collective action?

The process of denationalization, which Saskia Sassen amongst others has been attempting to analyze, is clearly not a seamless process, even when implemented by well-resourced institutions and knowledgeable people. While Sassen’s main concern is with the denationalizing impulse within nation-states (e.g., ministries), denationalization is also associated with pushes beyond the national scale by institutions in other sectors, including higher education.

When universities reorient from the national to the global and decide to open up a branch campus, for example, they are faced with a whole host of options and questions related to values (the guiding principles), geographical imagination (scales to work at), capabilities (moving from vision to implementation and governance), level of engagement (the depth of linkage question), and mechanism for entry (ranging from franchising (yes, this term is used) through to fiercely independent campuses with replica faculty working conditions).

gmurakLast week’s higher education media journalists allocated significant attention to the collapse of George Mason University’s campus at Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) in the United Arab Emirates. Here are a few of the key articles:

Link here for the GMU announcement, and here for a pre-set Google weblog search on the topic. GMU’s Provost (Peter N. Stearns) also had this to say, in a refreshingly open and honest way:

Closing the RAK Campus

By this point many people in the Mason community will know that we have decided to close the Mason operation in Ras al-Khaimah as of the end of this semester. Negotiations with our funding partners in RAK broke down both over budget levels for the current year and over changes our partners sought in reporting structures. We concluded that the result would not allow us to sustain the academic quality to which we’re committed and indeed might affect our accreditation. The decision having been made, we are working hard to live up to the obvious responsibility we have to our students there (about 120 of them), giving them as many options as possible including facilitating their coming to our campus here to complete their work. It’s a messy and distressing process.

As negotiations began to break down, I had several days of self-castigation, wondering what I could have done better to help prevent this unfortunate result. Then this week our University Relations office, trying to get me ready for the questions that might arise at a press conference, included the stinger, “Who at Mason is most responsible for the failure of the RAK campus.” That would be me. I know of several errors in judgment I committed or was involved in, that may have had some impact on the slower-than-expected enrollment growth (which was the clearest area where what we were trying to do broke down somewhat). I certainly know of several things I would do differently in a similar undertaking in future, including making sure we were well enough funded at the outset to hire a manager at our end to oversee the project. I also believe that it is important to admit mistakes (and to be forgiven for them, as long as they don’t pile up unacceptably). I’ve never cared for a leadership situation that either pushes toward denial of error, or assumes that any error will be seized upon without mercy. But I further believe that it’s vital not just to admit, to learn from, but also to get over. So we’re working hard on cleaning up the RAK residuum but also looking to other projects, including some in the global arena, that are pushing out in really promising directions.

This is an issue we have written and spoken about before, and it is one that national associations (e.g., the American Council of Education (ACE)) are starting to pay attention to.  See these ACE reports, for example:

Yet, despite the production of these informative reports, and associated discussions in Washington DC, I can’t help but wonder why there is not more collective action to understanding the pros and cons of the branch campus development process, with guides and courses to assist. In the GMU-RAK case everyone — the host government, the university, and the students — loses. You would think, given the scale of the endeavors underway (especially in the Middle East, and Asia to a lesser degree) that at least one information-packed website would have been developed, or one short-term executive education-style course would have been set up. Yet there is nothing, nadda, zip. GlobalHigherEd probably has more information than any other open-access website (at least in English) yet it is woefully undeveloped, dependent as it is on our spare time (which is in short supply right now).

If I could create the dream resource for the administrative entrepreneurs in universities considering branch campuses, it would consist of a 2-3 year long program of periodic one week courses run by INSEAD (developer of the most successful new campus in a distant location (it is actually their second campus, versus a ‘branch campus’)) to deal with the strategy and negotiation elements, in association with regional (area studies) experts. It is worth adding that Gabriel Hawawini and Arnoud De Meyer (now at the Judge School of Business, University of Cambridge) guided the INSEAD campus into existence. I recognize that INSEAD is only a business school, but they have thought through all aspects of the development process, and have situated the issue within a broader context regarding both strategy and the political economy of development in host nations. INSEAD also has a track record in developing resilient campuses and programs abroad. INSEAD might also draw in expertise from the University of Warwick, which developed the most comprehensive planning process yet; one that led them to decide, in 2005, to not develop a Singapore-based branch campus for approximately 10,000 students.

If I could create the dream resource for the officials and politicians considering hosting branch campuses, it would consist of a 2-3 year long program of periodic one week courses jointly run by INSEAD, the OECD’s Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE), the International Association of Universities (IAU), and 1-2 key national associations of universities (e.g., ACE) from likely source countries. This rather heterogeneous grouping would have the capacity to deal with the range of issues host governments need to consider when devising and implementing this form of capacity building development strategy, while being distant enough from the process to critique host government’s fixation with importing ‘brand names’ above all else. My research on the development process in Singapore also generated a feeling that host governments have a challenging time understanding how universities in other parts of the world function (both formally and informally). Even senior ministerial officials with overseas degrees lack sufficient knowledge and perspective: they were, after all, only students during their time abroad.

Finally, the courses would be heavily subsidized by the governments of both source and host countries, the World Bank, and the OECD, thereby drawing in both curious and committed stakeholders. It would also result in the production of a comprehensive open access web-based portal on all aspects of the development process; a permanent resource, if you will, for governments and universities reflecting about this issue. While it is to be expected that consultancies like the Washington Advisory Group will attempt to profit from this development process, insights on the development process need to be circulated much more widely in the public sphere.

George Mason University’s campus in Ras al Khaymah has collapsed. Similar collapses have happened in Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, and several other countries. How many more messy failures like this do we need? Why can’t we deal with this issue in a collective way, one sensitive to the viewpoints of all parties associated with this complicated development process, yet one that recognizes that capabilities to ‘reach out’ in new ways need to be systematically enhanced.

Kris Olds