From the graph, we can tell that disparity in educational opportunities between the rich and poor expands as educational levels move up.
However even educational opportunities are less unequal compared with higher education, I believe the educational quality for students is very different.
The table above shows some of the largest universities in different South Asian countries in terms of enrollments and number of affiliated colleges. It illustrates the magnitude of the problem in the four countries and just how big the universities can get. Though American university systems can be comparable, the key difference is that every campus, department and faculty member in these universities enjoys much more academic autonomy and discretion than their counterparts in South Asia. Also, one large American system usually serves the whole state, while Indian states can have up to 6 or 7 such universities per state,Pakistani provinces can have 2 or 3 such universities, and Bangladesh affiliates all its undergraduate colleges through one university.
If you wish to read more about the affiliation system and it’s impact on quality of higher educaion, this report is a great place to start with: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/127201468294337164/Affiliated-colleges-in-South-Asia-is-quality-expansion-possible
In the past few weeks, we talked about higher education in Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Recently, THE DataPoints (Times Higher Education) provides a set of useful and interesting comparative data between China and three major Asian countries respectively: India, South Korea, and Japan.
Here is the news published on THE:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/chinas-universities-significant-progress-more-do
The article reveals where Chinese universities are starting to outpace their rivals, as well as illustrating where China is still relatively lagging behind.
China VS India
The China-India chart shows that China has surpassed India on most measures. It can be attributed to several reasons:
However, one metric proves a blog posted two weeks ago that India has a higher number of doctorates awarded than China.
China VS South Korea
The article gives a high rating to South Korea’s HE system. THE data scientist said that “South Korea was the shining example to any education ministry about how to improve their university sector.” There are two key aspects that China needs to catch up:
However, although there is a gap between the two countries now, the article is optimistic about the future development of China’s higher education because of the outpouring of support from the Chinese government.
China VS Japan
I remember that Sho talked about the evolution of the balance between private and public funding in Japan’s HE. The China-Japan chart shows that Japan’s universities are behind both China and South Korea on the amount of income that universities are attracting from industry.
It is very interesting that Japan has a much higher staff-to-student ratio than China. However, the article claims that it is because of the collapse of the youth population in the country and it brings serious challenges for Japan to keep its leading role in Asia and globally.
Questions: Do you think that the data and metrics THE Data picked up reflect the real situation in your country? Why? Does this article present the future layout of Asian HE?
Following the presentation discussion, I found some data in oversea students and returnees.
While the huge number of overseas students is noteworthy, China is certainly experiencing a significant return migration over the last decade. China’s rapid economic development and good government policy have been identified as the top two reasons given for returning.
Hi Class! This time I present data relevant to our previous classes – flow of international students in Asia.
This excel below shows from which country in Asia to which country (mostly OECD) students are enrolled abroad at a tertiary level. (e.g. 90245: number of Chinese students studying in Australia)
(Reference: OECD Statistics, http://stats.oecd.org/)
And not surprisingly, aside from U.S. and UK, this revealed one important country with regard to international students’ flow, which could be categorized into Asia but had not been covered by this particular class – Australia. I wanna focus on this country in this blog because I believe we cannot discuss students’ flow within Asian countries without referring to Australia.
Here are some excerpts from an interesting article elaborating difficult situation surrounding this country
“In 2015, there were 272,095 higher education international students in Australia who contributed almost A$12.5 billion to the economy.”
“In Australia, however, international students have few scholarship opportunities, and no local jobs specifically waiting for them after graduation.”
“One aspect of this discussion policymakers might want to consider is becoming host to satellite campuses from world-renowned universities. So far only Carnegie Mellon has an offshore campus in Australia. Having such satellite campuses creates not only diversity and internationalisation in the Australian higher education space, but also provides other benefits. These include more competitive choices of institutions on Australian soil, as well as greater opportunities for students to move between countries on exchange. Having top Asian universities set up campuses in Australia promotes increased flows of top students and staff. This would help strengthen Australia’s position in the region as a high-quality education hub.”
So here clearly we can see another type of dilemma – different from Japan (attracting foreign students into homogeneity), South Korea (getting out of brain drain), Hong Kong and Taiwan (aiming to become international hub in Asian HE). Maybe Australia’s situation is somewhat similar to Singapore, but still a lot of differences in terms of country size and its historical context etc.
Let us know any thoughts or comments. Thank you for reading!
(Reference: Rising players in higher education: the countries to watch out for)
http://theconversation.com/rising-players-in-higher-education-the-countries-to-watch-out-for-62964
(Note: income level is given by GDP per capita. Economies’ position in the figure reflects their ranking by income and technology. Technology clusters are divided into three on the basis of the skill and hig-tech intensity of their products and exports.)
this proxy provides an assessment of an economy’s productivity and ability to move up the value chain within the service, manufacturing, non-manufacturing industry, and agricultural sectors.
Interestingly Japan has relatively high HE enrollment ratio(50+%) compared with other Asian countries. Korea has the highest level of enrollment ratio across the globe. However, Japan still has the highest level of GDP per capita and output per workers. There must be other factors leading to the outputs. However if we analyze from the perspective of higher education, I would say Japan has the highest capability of transferring knowledge/technology in HE into output.
Source: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/Resources/226300-1279680449418/7267211-1318449387306/EAP_higher_education_fullreport.pdf
Hi all,
Below are the private/public funding distribution in Korea, Japan. Based on the data from OECD, Japan has a higher and stable public funding ratio, and public funding in Korea is catching up. For China, the detailed breakdown indicates that public funding is also increasing rather fast.
These findings coincide the observations in public expenditure per HE student (2000 vs. 2011) and in public expenditure on HE as a percentage of total public education expenditure. At the right hand sides of the axis, we can tell that from 2000 to 2011, Korea, Japan and China have all increased public expenditure on HE. This is not the case of many other Asian countries.
Interestingly Japan and Korea have a higher proportion of gross domestic expenditure on R&D than China. For private enrollment and Institutional Share in HE, Korea is the highest across all Asian countries, Japan more or less similar and China lagging far behind.
Source: OECD
Source: OECD
Source: China Statistical Yearbook 2015
Source: Asian Development Bank
Last week we looked at some indicators of Higher Education access across South Asian countries that elicited some very interesting discussion. This week, we mined some more data from UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics on higher education quality across the South Asian countries. Coincidentally, it ties it neatly with this week’s News post on the newly released Times HE Rankings! Below are some infographics on the student-instructor ratios, public HE expenditure per student and academic rankings across South Asian countries.
Quality of higher education is tough to measure and these indicators are far from perfect. What other information would you like to have on HE quality in other countries? Do you think that it is fair to apply the same normative criteria of ‘good quality’ for developed nations and for developing economies? What are the the benefits for South Asian nations in chasing these quality targets?
Source: Higher Education in Asia: Expanding Out, Expanding Up (http://www.uis.unesco.org/
