Mobility, Markets, and Equity in Higher Education: Match or

Mismatch? Peter Hershock

Deane NeubauerEast-West Center

The Great Transformation?

• Conflicting Dynamics of Globalization– Both integrating and fragmenting dynamics– Expanding commodification and privatization– Accelerating flows of goods and services– Heightened personal and institutional mobility

• Terms “cross border education” and “international organization” do not do justice to transformational nature of contemporary globalization

Fundamental Transformations• The dominant narrative does not do justice to the probable

course for higher education.• “The dominant narrative- the ongoing transformation of

higher education is inevitable, our efforts should be directed to effectively and efficiently manage it, and the competitive dynamics of an emerging global higher education market will foster both accelerated innovation and tightening alignment of higher education outputs and market needs.

• A contrary narrative: on its present heading, the arc of higher education change may be one of ever-expanding educational access and options while at the same time compromising epistemic diversity and exacerbating global educational inequity.”

Going Beyond the Cross-Border Metaphor

• The power of metaphors to provoke inquiry and analysis

• Understanding that seeking higher education as cross-border activity one of its oldest characterization—even if the meaning of borders meant something different than contemporary nation-state borders.

• Contemporary cross border exchange a post WWII phenomenon, driven by national policy needs.

Looking at the Numbers• Global growth of higher education– From 2.1 % in 1955 to 7.7% in 1965, 10.7% in 1975, 12.9%

in 1985, 16.2% in 1995, 19% in 2000, and 26% in 2007—familiarly, from elite to mass to universal to use Trow’s terms.

– Because of such growth in the base, the percentage of students studying in foreign countries dropped from 10% to 2%, but by 2007 there were approximately 150 million students in global higher education.

– However, growth from approximately 110,000 in 1950, to 1.8 million in 2000 and an estimated 2.8 in 2007.

– Are we looking at increases in border crossing, or border erosion?

Borderless Higher Education? Or, Borders of a Different Kind?

• The role that a borderless world plays in the global imaginary—the advent of geography-liberated freedoms of choice.– planet-wide erasure of spatial and temporal limits to communication brought

about by the computing and telecommunications revolutions of the last quarter century

– if borders control access, and if free market growth is pegged to ever-expanding consumer options through unrestricted flows of goods, services, people and capital, then world’s free market future will of necessity be borderless.

• But…not so fast. Increased global integration is bringing with it simultaneously increased global fragmentation.

• Thus, erosion of borders has not necessarily resulted in dissolution of borders. Note Harvey’s “Uneven geographies of development.”

• Note the doubling of the income gap between the richest and the poorest 20% on the planet and the stubborn persistence of this trend.

• Top 2% of population owns 50% of global wealth; bottom 50% owns 1%

Boundaries as New Global Divisions

• Deepening divide between global North and South is found not only among societies, but also within them—a boundary that is sadly as real as it is unimaginable.

• Although the expanding circuits of exchange and accelerating flows of goods, services, people and information that characterize the dynamics of contemporary globalization have not brought about the complete erasure of geopolitical boundaries, their volume and velocity have been sufficient to bring about a highly contingent and yet value-driven disintegration and reconfiguration of geographical landscapes, social, economic, political and cultural topographies.

Complicity of Higher Education• Not necessarily intentional• University has played a positive and leading role in

some instances to the “structure and proliferation” of modern values, including universality, sovereignty, equality, precision, competition and control…

• Yet…modernization has also involved consolidating new constellations of power and producing new kinds of populations suited to the recursively amplifying dynamics of nationalization, marketization, and industrialization—disciplinary dynamics in which higher education has been integrally involved since at least the middle of the 19th century

HE’s “inconvenient truth”• “Inconvenient truth,”--modern higher education represents

valueshas been infused with values structurally implicated in the “creative destruction” of human relational ecologies.

• The “emacipatory” goals of higher education notwithstanding, the wider ecological and climatic effects of modern industrialization suggest that higher education has also been structurally implicated in the potentially catastrophic degradation of natural ecologies and the systematic attenuation of natural, cultural and epistemic diversity.

• “Diversity” is used in a technical sense in contrast with mere variety. In brief, diversity is a qualitative relational dynamic that emerges as a function of complex interdependence and consists in mutually reinforcing contributions to sustainably shared flourishing. In contrast, variety is a quantitative index of multiplicity that entails nothing more than either simple or complicated patterns of coexistence.

Networks, Complexity, Volatility and Values

• The birth of “network society” and “global informational capitalism” (Castells, 1996/1997/1998)—a world in which social structures and activities are organized around and through electronically mediated flows of information.

• Network growth is spurred and shaped by negative (relation-stabilizing) and positive (interaction-accelerating and difference-amplifying) feedback. In other words, network growth is internally generated as a complex function of recursively structured flows of information, both within the network and between the network and its various environments.

Simultaneity • A second key feature of the global networks that have

emerged with the development of practically instantaneous and ubiquitous global telecommunications is that they support interactions in a “timeless time” (Castells) beyond the constraints imposed by either biological or logical time, and a “space of flows” in which all places are effectively contiguous.

• Global communicative simultaneity carries us beyond the “space-time compression” that characterized industrial modernization and globalization (Harvey, 1989) toward immersion in an unbounded space-time singularity that—like the core processes of modernization—can be seen as at once emacipatory and disciplinary.

Uncertainty• Importantly, beyond certain scales and scopes of interactivity and

recursivity, the dynamics of global networks foster the emergence of complex adaptive systems

• Both self-organizing and novelty-generating. • Distinctively, complex systems change in ways that are in principle

impossible to anticipate. While the negative feedback informing the growth of complex networks stabilizes relations, ongoing positive feedback both accelerates differentiation and accentuates uncertainty.

• Thus, while global dynamics over the past half-century have been inflected toward increasing interdependence, they have not only been marked by increasing coherence, but also by increasing, internally-generated volatility.

Unpredictability• Global financial crisis an instance of lack of systemic predictability• Emergence of complexly networked circuits of exchange is concomitant

with the ushering in of what has been usefully theorized as “reflexive modernization”

• Occurs when the scale and scope of global interdependencies reach the point beyond which it is impossible to externalize the costs of further growth and development.

• Further expansions of instrumental rationality and technological control begin resulting in the amplifying production of unpredictable risks, hazards and threats in the face of which decisions nevertheless have to be made.

• Early phase of growth of public goods within modernization now being displaced by growth of public bads, such as pollution, poverty, environmental degradation and the effects of climate change that are unplanned, ironic consequences of continued industrialization and globalization.

Rethinking Trajectory of Higher Education Change

• First, it will turn out to be other than we had expected.• In a non-linear transformation causal explanations have

only very local predicative value and—contrary to what is suggested by dependency theory or by the educational adaptation of the “flying geese” model of economic development (Kuroda and Passarelli, 2009)—change is neither being imposed (globally) from above nor percolating up (locally) from below.

• Rather, it is being continuously effected from all educational scales and positions as an emergent function of cascading, unpredictable and yet non-random movements in the direction of heightening interactivity, accelerating differentiation and reduced organizational hierarchy.

Second

• We also may expect higher education change to make evident and accentuate tensions between increasing structural uniformity and standardization on one hand, and increasing variation and flexibility on the other.

• We can expect higher education to assume forms that are ambiguously modern and postmodern, public and private, pure and applied, operationally demonstrating a shift from an either/or logic to a both/and logic of systemic, institutional and programmatic development.

• We see this in the demise of “one size fits all” education.

Which leads to…

• As the density and quality of network interactions cross crucial thresholds increase, we expect a shift from predominantly contingent, instrumentally established external relations that insure the essential integrity of relational partners toward increasingly constitutive, thematically improvised internal relations.

• We can expect first, the advent of global higher education systems built cooperatively around common practices, and then the emergence of global higher education societies coordinated dynamically around shared norms and values

Finally…• The problem-to-predicament transition associated

with the rise of reflexive modernity and world risk society seem to warrant expectations of an epistemic revolution involving the displacement of individual “bodies of knowledge” by “knowledge ecologies” and a progressive re-embedding of the technical within the ethical, a healing of the modern severance of knowledge (knowing-that and knowing-how) and wisdom (knowing-to) (Hershock, 2009)

• The integration of higher education into the dynamics of global network society promises to be both opportune and dangerous.

Consequences• Integration of higher education into the dynamics of global network society

promises to be both opportune and dangerous. • Increased marketization, commodification and competition within higher

education are likely to reproduce the kinds of disparities found in other markets where commodification of basic needs has resulted in the institutionalization of entirely new classes of the poor.

• As higher education comes is less fully supported and provided as a public good and delivered instead as a marketable commodity, vast populations are likely to find themselves disciplined into a compulsory, lifelong consumption of educational goods and services that will reinforce rather than eliminate poverty (Hershock, 2007).

• At a more systemic level, the commodification of higher education will render it subject to market failures in the form, of sudden and unpredicted devaluations of certain degrees or a long-term collapses of employment prospects for graduates overall.

• The marketization of higher education cannot be expected to be without the fickle and fractious potentials associated with other forms of capitalist “creative destruction.”

Further Consequences• Actualizing the common practices and shared values needed to bring

about global higher education systems and societies will not inexorably result in greater, worldwide educational diversity and equity.

• As an emergent relational quality indexing the extent to which differences are activated as the basis of meaningful contribution to sustainably shared flourishing, diversity cannot be either mandated or expected to happen simply as a matter of course.

• Extent and depth of interaction needed to produce and sustain conditions ripe for the emergence of diversity are very unlikely to be realized in context of retrenching disciplinary silos, expanding short-term programs, and the normalization of the wholly elective and limited relational bandwidth that is tacitly imposed by distance education.

• Increased connectivity in higher education cannot be expected, by itself, to enhance educational diversity.

Outside the Education Sector

• Finally, given the uneven geographies of development it is not reasonable to expect higher education to function as a force for greater equity outside of the education sector.

• To the degree that the provision and purposes higher education are aligned with market needs the less likely it is that higher education will contribute significantly to realizing more equitably oriented patterns of globalization and economic activity.

In Conclusion• While dominant over the past two decades, neoliberalism

does not symbolize the “end of history.” • The mobilization of higher education to serve the needs of

global informational capitalism is not a “done deal.” Globally, we are still in positions to place higher education mobility into more critical perspective and to work toward aligning 21st century higher education change processes with deepening emphases on the values of diversity and equity as a global relations commons and global public good—a commons and public good crucial to the activation of especially cognitive and cultural differences as the basis of articulating viable means-to and meanings-of truly shared global flourishing.

Circuits of Exchange

• Sassen’s metaphor is of value because of its intuitive power (everybody knows what a circuit is, and it is no great reach to think of things that are being exchanged within it.)

• However, it has the great virtue of bounding our inquiry so that we have a ready frame for our analyses.

• And, it creates possibilities for extensive and subtle research explorations by focusing on the multiple layers that make up the circuit. In this way, it approximates the virtues of “thick description.” (For example, one can imagine a volume of detailed institutional case studies of how m & m actually affect institutions.)

Interrogating “change”

• Change: the Tokyo papers suggest in various ways that what are termed mobility and migration involve at least four kinds of change:– Genuine innovation– Change that is profound and enduring– Change that is more apparent than real– Change that is gradual, cumulative, and ultimately

transformational

Dimensions of Exchange• “Variables” that make up important aspects of the circuit of exchange that we

nominally call higher education mobility and migration, and some possible indicators for them.

• An index of mobility and migration could be created that would model the circuits of exchange.

• This could have value for:– higher education researchers (it helps us think about how such institutions

are changing); – policy makers (it helps them to understand how resources are being invested

and the returns being gained from them and clarifies the nature of the policy space within which they are operating);

– higher education institutions (it helps us gain a better understanding of what we are doing—at the descriptive level—and what some of the consequences might be of our actions.

Factors• Movement of students, faculty, administrators for various purposes, e.g.

• Degree study• Less than degree study levels of degree study, durations of degree

study, etc. • Funded and unfunded research, with or without external

appointments• Academic meetings that range from presenting research results

to being exposed to new models of some aspect of higher education through training

• Formal and informal relationships that “bind institutions together”, e.g. joint agreements, mergers, MOAs

Circulation of “Ideas”• Examine such things as the growth and diversification of faculty

participation in scholarly publication• The growth and spread of outlets for scholarly publication—new journals,

websites, etc.• Development, growth,, and spread of new pedagogies and their

consequences• Development, growth and spread of “institutional standards” that could

include (but not be limited to) quality matters, governance issues (e.g. public and private), financial modalities, ideas of “accountability”

• Development and growth of regional public policy “discourses”, e.g. alignment, autonomy, etc.

• Development of new methods to measure research output, e.g. league tables, citation indexes, web citation inventories (next stage in Google searches)

Circulation of Structures

• One can separate these from ideas, although obviously they proceed from ideas about how universities should be organized

• Included here are discourses and suggestions about how higher education institutions should be organized (traditional faculties, departments, etc), the emergence of new internal governance structures (e.g. transformation of the presidential role from symbolic to de facto CEO), internal mechanisms of audit, aggregation of institutional units into systems, etc.

Linkages

• This focus is on structural and behavioral endeavors designed specifically to tie HEIs to entities above their traditional location, e.g. consortia (both formal and informal), regional and global associations (for research, pedagogy, leadership, quality, etc.), membership organizations (one step more formalized than associations and usually involving more formal agreements and membership stakes.

• Formal structural links to entities outside the national frame, such as joint campuses, twinning arrangements, etc.