Author Archives: ndb2124

Higher Education, MOOCs, and Illiberal Governance

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In the same way that debates are presently taking place regarding the organization and administration of systems of higher education, discussion as to the organization of states themselves and their relationship with each other is likewise occurring. In those nations where governmental power is derived through the ballot box, much attention has been paid to whether there is a correlation between a person’s education level and their support for policies that promote cultural openness and liberalism. Analysis of voter preferences in several recent polls seem to indicate that individuals who have completed higher education tend to be more positively disposed toward policies which promote openness and inclusion than those who have not. At the same time, recent elections have given rise to leaders that threaten the liberal order, as in the Philippines, and elsewhere, once-democratic leaders have tended towards illiberalism in countries like Hungary, Turkey, and the Ukraine.

Recently, these two debates came to a head in Hungary, where illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orban used a parliamentary majority to pass a law targeting academic freedoms. One university, in particular, has been the target of Orban’s ire for several years. Central European University in Budapest, was founded in 1991 by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to reintroduce liberal thought in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Orban, meanwhile, most often makes headlines for his government’s staunch opposition to EU migration policy and for closing Hungary’s borders to refugees. Technically, the university is accredited to award graduate and doctoral degrees in both the U.S. and Hungary, however, the sole physical campus is in Budapest. Orban’s new law forbids this practice: now foreign universities must have a campus in their country of origin to operate a satellite campus in Hungary.

Orban’s persecution of CEU has inspired outrage throughout the academic community. Michael Ignatieff, former professor at Harvard and Oxford, leader of the Canadian Liberal party, and current President of CEU, has been an outspoken critic of Orban at the global level. Outside of CEU staff, Cas Mudde, noted scholar on European populism, used an editorial in The Guardian to call upon the EU to intervene on behalf of liberal freedoms. After 70,000 people protested the move in Budapest last month, the EU presented Orban with an official notice this week, calling on his government to explain the ‘breach of EU law.’ This is considered the first step in bringing a legal penalty against Orban, however, it is largely contingent upon Hungary’s cooperation in the process. As a result, CEU’s fate remains unclear.

Orban’s effort, while posing a threat to democracy and intellectual freedom, could well be undermined by today’s unprecedented individual mobility and global technological integration. Orban can shut down an American university, but he cannot stop the flow of ideas from America and other countries to Hungary. Just take China as an example. While the Chinese government banned Facebook, Twitter and popular Western social media sites, people in China found ways to access these sites and spread their know-hows on the Internet. Meanwhile Turkey, where some 5,000 academics have been fired or arrested in response to the failed July coup, is an ongoing case study in whether the global knowledge sharing economy can actively overcome illiberal domestic policies.

In today’s technological landscape of high-speed internet and free social media sites, ideas can spread cheaply and almost instantaneously. Governments can shut down the physical form of a university, but the function of the university – a democratic hub for idea exchange and intellectual development – has been shared by the Internet, even before the rise of MOOCs. The most effective way to stop the exchange of global ideas, perhaps, is by completely shutting down the Internet, which is not something that China, Turkey, or Hungary would seriously attempt.

Characterizing the Globalized African University

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This week I found an article which analyzes the station of higher education in Africa. We haven’t yet dealt with African cases in class, so I figured that this might be a topic of interest. The article “The African University as ‘Global’ University” was written by Isaac Kamola, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College.

Kamola argues that, despite a low matriculation rate of 3% in sub-Saharan Africa, it is intellectually valuable to analyze African universities as global universities. The main thrust is that the ‘globe’ has had an indelible effect on the development of the African university- whether by colonization or the international finance regime- and that the objective for policymakers today is to distinguish between what is African about the university system and what is not.

Perhaps the most interesting point Kamola raises, concerns the role of the World Bank in impeding the development of African higher education. In the years following decolonization, many African states faced financial crises, which they sought to solve with loans from the World Bank. As a condition of the loan, the World Bank mandated austerity measures targeting, among other things, higher education spending. The cuts inspired street protests by university students who were met with violent crackdowns by military and police forces. Today however, the World Bank prioritizes higher education as an essential pathway in economic development. All this provides an interesting backdrop for Kamola’s thesis: that despite it’s low domestic enrollment, lack of research, and lack of international students, African universities are wary of anymore globalization.

For me the piece raises interesting questions about the proper course of higher education policy in developing countries. Should states prioritize creating national universities, which may be directed towards addressing domestic policy problems and fostering locally-sourced solutions, or prioritize university globalization? Is it even possible to make that decision as a developing country when the Western model and its emphasis on internationalization is so dominant globally? How else do you foster a culturally-specific intellectual tradition?

With these questions, I’m reminded of the discussions we had early on this semester regarding the significance of a university’s ‘legacy’ when making admissions decisions. At the time, we were concerned with how a recently established, campus-less university would attract students compared to a similarly ranked conventional university. From Kamola’s perspective, similar questions apply to universities with a colonial legacy, and also to more recently established institutions that continue to be patterned on the Western model. While, he is less concerned with admissions decisions than with cultural cohesion, his answer is that establishing an African university is more important to the continent’s long-term development than simply establishing universities in Africa.

Re-framing the Affordability Debate in U.S. Higher Ed

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In March, the Institute for Higher Education Policy published a study on college affordability in the United States. The report, titled Limited Means, Limited Options: College Remains Unaffordable for Many Americans highlights the growing upfront cost of attending university in the United States.

Their key finding after analyzing price data for 2000 colleges was that federal aid policies aren’t doing enough to ensure anything approaching equal access. The current mixture of grants, federally subsidized loans, and loan forgiveness programs are not sufficiently funded to close the opportunity gap between low income and high income students. One reason the study suggest this may be, is that there is a basic lack of understanding with regards to how widely each student’s sense of affordability varies.

The study attempted to show this by assessing what colleges were accessible to what students, accounting for differences in wealth, family background, status as a dependent. The researchers measured cost of attendance by net price (cost of attendance minus grant aid) and compared these using Lumina Foundation’s Affordability Benchmark based on discretionary income. To account for the options each student faces, the researchers created student profiles which were representative of the income levels and dependency status of the college applicant population in the U.S. 

The researchers determined that the cost of attendance is increasing, while it is becoming harder to cover costs using student loans. In fact, the researchers determine that even with subsidized student loans, low income students rarely gain much flexibility in their choice of college and now face loan payments. In that way, affordability still entirely depends on one’s starting place.

As we’ve seen in class, the rising cost of higher education in Asia is associated with privatization in the sector. Perhaps the most telling finding of this U.S. study then, is that if all publically funded universities moved to free tuition, low-income students would face the same options of affordable colleges.

The study warns that the issue of affordability in U.S. education is being improperly framed as a question of value. The logic is that if a degree promises sufficient future returns, the cost is bearable, particularly if paid in small installments as is typical of a student loan. For many however, the study shows that the initial cost of attendance is too high a barrier to entry to even consider the long-term value of the credential.

How do international students experience university differently?

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When we are discussing issues of internationalization in class we usually stop at the institutional level. Otherwise, we may discuss people in terms of student population movements between countries. This week, I tried to find something recently published that looked deeper than that. In the most recent Journal of International Students, researchers from Azusa Pacific University evaluated the way college experiences for international students diverge from their that of their domestic peers. They explain that their research fills an important hole in the literature which often ignores student satisfaction outcomes for international students. Using data from the 2010 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), they came to some interesting conclusions.

The article shows that international students report lower levels of satisfaction with their college experience, with a particular weight placed on the quality of the classroom experience. Moreover, the researchers found that low levels of satisfaction correlated with lower levels of cognitive improvement. The researchers conclude that their findings should influence universities to craft more effective support systems for international students and ensure that international students’ satisfaction level equals that of their domestic peers. They suggest that knowingly selling an inferior product to an unwitting buyer is tantamount to exploitation on the part of the university.

Overall, I think the article makes a good moral argument about the risks of the profit model which is driving internationalization. That said, I don’t think the strength of their research design can quite back up the strength of their claim. For instance, the UCUES, from which the data for the study was pulled is a one-time survey of outgoing college seniors which relies extensively on retrospective self-reporting.  The study also suffers from a lack of longitudinal data. To be fair, the researchers do acknowledge these limitations in the concluding paragraphs.

Still, I think the article raises an important question about parity between students at research universities that may be uniquely relevant to SIPA given the size of its international student community.

Europeanizing Turkish Higher Education

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Last week, our readings dealt with higher education regionalism, with a particular emphasis on Europe. We read, for instance, the introduction to European Integration and the Governance of Higher Education and Research. There, Peter Maassen and Christine Musselin introduced the various processes of European integration and mused on their effects on policy at the national and university levels. In particular, Maasen & Musselin were interested in the effects of the Bologna process, noteworthy because it’s product, the Bologna Declaration, was the first affirmation by EU member states that an integrated higher education environment was a goal of the wider effort to integrate Europe.

Maassen & Musselin emphasize that the path to the Bologna Declaration was an arduous one, though in 1999, when the Declaration was signed, many of the states which typically prove controversial in debates regarding EU expansion had yet to be admitted (I’m thinking here of Eastern Europe and the Balkans- most of which did not join until after 2004). Because the Bologna declaration has grown to include non-EU member states, I was curious to know more about how less ‘Western’ countries aiming to align with the EU accommodate the integration process in the higher education sector. As recently as 24 January 2017, the comparative education journal Compare published a piece by Ozge Onursal-Besgul titled “Translating norms from Europe to Turkey: Turkey in the Bologna Process.”

Onursal-Besgul examines the process undertook by Turkey to integrate itself within the European educational space through the Bologna Process, from 2001 to 2012. The author raises two questions: first, what is being transferred from the European higher education space into the Turkish space? Second, how is the transfer being conducted? Ultimately, Onursal-Besgul concludes that the process of integration for Turkey has been delayed by the relative paucity of actors working towards the goal and by certain effects stemming from that. Specifically, Onursal-Besgul observes that too much of the responsibility for managing Turkey’s integration has been placed in one office, the Council of Higher Education. As a result, there is little buy-in from elsewhere in Turkish government or society, and the reformation process has been largely conducted from the top-down. The Turkish experience is different, therefore, from the wider European experience, which relied on horizontal cooperation between universities and national governments, instead of Turkey’s more authoritative approach.

The piece raises a number of questions relevant to our readings and about the challenges that policymakers face in regionalizing higher education. One question I still have is whether it is wise for established regional education spaces, like the European Higher Education Area, to accept that states are using the regionalization process as a catalyst for long overdue domestic reforms? This question has plagued the EU in a number of policy areas as it has expanded south and east  over the years.