Asia ‘will train future academic workforce’ for the world

Asia’s higher education enrolments already dwarf those of Europe and North America, and most of the world’s future academic workforce will be trained in the East. Yet new research claims that this remains widely unrecognised amid Western scepticism of the region’s “brittle” higher education systems.

A mapping exercise of 16 Asian countries, selected for their “diversity and coverage”, has thrown new light on Asia-Pacific higher education. Together, the 16 nations have about one-third more higher education institutions than Europe and North Africa combined, and enrol more than three times as many students.

The gap is widening, despite declining Asian demographics, as larger shares of both school leavers and mature workers set their sights on degrees. This contrasts with stuttering growth in the West, where large swathes of the population already have tertiary credentials.

Educational mobility patterns are also shifting eastwards, as administrators rely on foreign students for financial stability – much as their counterparts did a few decades ago in countries like Australia, Canada and the UK. “There is ample scope for the expansion of intra-Asia internationalisation of the student body,” notes the briefing document from Australia’s Higher Education Futures Lab (HEFL).

Co-author Hamish Coates said the “established higher education world” was mostly unaware that a change of guard was under way, partly because few were paying attention and partly because of an “astounding” lack of data on Asian governments’ education spending and the numbers and types of higher education institutions.

“Asia’s moved from the periphery to the centre of higher education,” said Coates, professor of public policy affiliated with the Australian National University in Canberra and Tsinghua University in Beijing. “The region’s starting to realise its own demographic dividends. With all of the travel volatility and political uncertainties around visas, borders, health and the like, you can only imagine that the region will start sourcing its own supply.”

Humboldtian principles produced distinct European and American models of higher education, Coates noted. “There’s also an Asian model,” he said. “There’s probably many, and what they are, we don’t yet know.

“Despite diversity in how they regulate and fund higher education, Asian governments are giving rise to certain forms of higher education that are considered generalisable across the region. That’s important, because it means that there’s trust and it’s not dependent upon contingent political arrangements. A university is a university, and – notwithstanding all the diversity at the political level – universities play out in reasonably sustainable and robust ways.”

The briefing document covers seven of the world’s most populous countries – India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan and Vietnam – and nations with huge variation in prosperity and stability, from Singapore and South Korea to Nepal and Myanmar.

It contains a wealth of information on politics, economics, environment and demographics as well as higher education and research. “All indicators are sourced from established open international repositories, utilising the most recent figures available,” the document says.

“There are ample missing indicators. Exposing gaps is part of the point. We hope the analysis stimulates more questions than answers and lays robust foundations for future replications.”

Coates said Westerners had tended to dismiss Eastern higher education as “volatile” and “in formation”, requiring “careful due diligence” around the qualifications it produced. This view overlooked “a maturity that’s quite different to what we find in other parts of the world” – often because of the “absence” of government.

The analysis found that 65 per cent of the 12,600-odd higher education institutions across the 16 sampled countries could be defined as private. Many are beating their own path to degree recognition and accreditation, Coates said.

“They’re sourcing global accreditation to substantiate themselves. All sorts of accreditation shops service the Asian market. Business schools and engineering schools get their bona fides through that mechanism, and the students, parents, communities and professions will trust that.

“But at the same time, persistent inequalities are [evident in] the lack of the region’s ability to form cooperation and qualification recognition schemes. There’s a long way to go to form a coherent higher education region that resembles anything like the United States or Europe – and yet it’s so much bigger.”

While the document does not break higher education enrolments down by study level, Coates said Asia was delivering “not just undergraduate provision at scale, but all sorts of really innovative research degrees”. Europeans and North Americans will “flock to Asia” for PhDs, he said.

“Is it happening now? No. Will it happen in the coming decades? Almost for sure. What we’ve foreshadowed in the briefing is only going to be magnified as these people themselves go into mid and senior careers and run universities.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com