THE GLOBAL SPACE: Some strategic implications for research-intensive universities, of cross-border flows and global rankings

Transcription

1 Leading the Next Phase of Internationalisation : U21, Auckland, 10 May 2006 THE GLOBAL SPACE: Some strategic implications for research-intensive universities, of cross-border flows and global rankings Simon Marginson Monash University/ University of Melbourne (after ) simon.marginson@education.monash.edu.au Thank you Stuart. It is pleasure to be back in Auckland, after speaking with yourself and Chris about global strategy three weeks ago. Our backdrop topic is the next phase of internationalisation. What will comprise it? Not the kind of question that lends itself to low risk predictions. Those IDP data on expected growth in international students by 2025 framed a lot of university strategy but are now looking courageous. I ll confine myself to one safe prediction. Despite fluctuations in cross-border student movement, the future of researchintensive universities is more global rather than less. This is guaranteed by the continuing information revolution; the continued globalization of research teams, funding and publishing; and the new power of global rankings and comparisons (though in the US, US News and World Report will remain more important). Having made that safe prediction I ll now put down the crystal ball. Is that all he s got? you will say. That s not worth the price of lunch! Well, for the rest of the time, rather than predicting the future, I ll talk about how we strategise it. To make sense of what follows, some definitions. By internationalisation I mean not a norm or strategy but a condition. The term simply refers to enhanced relations across borders between nations, or between individual HEIs situated in national systems, without any necessary implication for changing identity or day to day practice. Globalisation is more transformative. The term refers to the widening, deepening and speeding up of interconnectedness on a world and meta-regional scale. Internationalisation happens at the edge of the nation, the borderlands, the docks and trading zones. In a networked world globalisation runs through the heartland of cities, nations and institutions. And changes them. In this more globalised era, the nation, national systems, funding and identity remain essential. But at the same time they have been relativized by global forces, creating new patterns of competition, comparison and cooperation. Increasingly, research universities deal directly across national borders. In this they have become de facto national policy makers. We can identify four distinct

2 2 but overlapping zones in which strategies and policies are formed, by governments, universities and both: institutions global dealings, intergovernmental negotiations, national system setting, and local agendas. It used to be that nearly all the action was in the bottom half of the slide. That s no longer the case, anywhere, though actual activities in the top half can vary greatly. Some global effects operate willy-nilly, outside the terms of nation-states, like the global labour market in research. A larger middle group of global effects can be modified or retarded within nations, although probably not for ever, and often the price of disengagement is diminished effectiveness. A further group of effects are suggested by the global environment, rather than compelled. National government system setting funding, incentives, stratification, accountability requirements, restrictions - remain part of the mix, along with institutional steering and management. There is much global imitation along parallel lines, and an under-explored scope for difference in organisation, product and strategy. There is a broader scope for strategy making in the global setting than in national systems. Here we are less path dependant. The global setting is larger, more changeable, more open with more scope for novelty. There s a global hierarchy but below the very top it is less fixed than the hierarchy at home. But there are limits to what each university (and each nation) can achieve at a given time, set by history, culture, capacity, resources and the reputation of both nation and institution. How do we make sense of this complex mix of free will and determinism? Pierre Bourdieu talks about being positioned, while also position-taking. As you know, the scope for position-taking itself varies over time. You have to take your opportunities when you can. As you also know, in some respects, what is position-taking for governments funding of teaching, R&D investment levels, the performance economy used to steer the national higher education system is position for HEIs. But institutions have more scope for independent action than in previous eras. Arguably, in most nations, research universities have more control over mission and identity, are less path governed, have more plural resources, and better steering instruments. What are the conditions that govern the capacity of universities to operate globally? The prior question is what are the components of self-determination?. Amartya Sen argues that the essential components are agency freedom, meaning grounded and self-controlled identity, and freedom as power, which is his reworking of Berlin s concept of positive freedom. (Negative freedom, the classic freedom from coercion, is contained within freedom as power, as one of its conditions). To this I would add, in the university setting, the capacity to imagine and act in original ways, to create genuine strategic innovations, what some call the epistemological break. Now in global research universities, both the executive and the academic faculty need these three kinds of capacity; and to be effective in practice they must also maintain a thick set of connections

3 3 across borders, preferably on a multilingual basis. The task is easier for teaching only institutions, including for-profits of the Phoenix type. They face the full implications of market forces, but they do not have to nurture or to pay for a globalised academic heartland sitting at the cutting edge. They have to develop customized courseware, but they can function without a broad-base in languages, something that in future universities may find it difficult to do. So far I have emphasized position-taking. Let s look more at position, at operating conditions in the global setting. Here what stands out is the hegemonic global role of the United States in our sector. Looking at the numbers, the US is nearly as globally dominant in higher education as it is in film and television. Spending $300 billion PPP a year on higher education makes that possible. The United States publishes about a third of the world s scientific papers. It has a third of the world s top 500 universities as measured by the Shanghai Jiao Tong index, 53 of the top 100, and a massive 17 of the top 20. It has an extraordinary 3568 ISI HighCI researchers, a category that drives much of the Shanghai Index, compared to 221 in Germany, 215 Japan, 135 France, 97 in Australia and 20 China, and so on. It is a mighty magnet for cross-border doctoral students: in there were 102,084 foreign doctoral students in the USA, about half the world-wide total of mobile doctoral students. Despite the nonchalance in the Research 1 s about globalization, the US gives priority to attracting and holding the top flight foreign talent. More than 30 per cent of all international students in US research universities are doctoral students, three quarters of them receive scholarship support, and half stay on after graduation. The USA is also the main site of post-doctoral work, and recruits high quality mature faculty, though the visa regime has tightened since Without trying hard the USA also enrolls 28 per cent of the world s two million international students at all course levels. However the USA is not the only country that performs well in research, when we take economic capacity into account. In the slide, national economic capacity is calculated by compounding each nation s GDP with its GDP per head. Each nation s share of global economic capacity is compared to its share of the Jiao Tong top 500 and top 100. It is interesting to note that in the nations that do well, except for the United States, the private sector plays a minor role and publicly funded research universities are dominant. The leading performers in order are Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada and Finland. Denmark and Australia are further back. The US performs very well in its share of the top 100 research universities but under-performs in the top 500, indicating the stratification effects of a highly competitive system status and research resources are concentrated in the leading universities at the expense of regional knowledge economies. Germany does well at the level of the top 500, indicating a broad-based research capacity across the nation but not in the top 100.

4 4 The global market in degrees is dominated by the Anglophone nations, with more than half of all exports. Increasingly, Asian and European nations are themselves offering English language programs to attract foreign business. However, English is only one of the languages spoken by one billion people; the other is Putonghua ( Mandarin Chinese). In addition two pairings of related and mutually intelligible languages are spoken by more than half a billion people: Hindi/ Urdu, and Spanish/ Portuguese. Another three languages are spoken over 200 million people: Russian, Bengali and Arabic. Another four languages have more than 100 million speakers. In the long term the global hegemony of English may not be sustained at its present extent, especially outside the sciences, for example if China becomes a more important indigenous producer of research and academic publishing, and Spanish and Arabic consolidate their global potentials. Another positioning factor is global rankings. Universities are judged by research performance. It is foundational to reputation, except in the for-profit sector, operating as a proxy for degree power and even teaching quality. Shanghai Jiao Tong has provided a credible set of data on research performance that tightens those causal inks. Research performance can no longer be fudged; and the whole global sector has been decisively opened up to global competition. National governments now want super-league universities. The possible outcome will be an upward secular trend in public research investment. The probable outcome will be greater concentration and stratification, though in many nations there are political obstacles to this. The certain outcome will be price effects. After Jiao Tong every HiCi researcher, potential HiCi researcher and brilliant postdoc is in a better bargaining postion. Few nations are salary competitive with the USA, in which in paid 6 per cent of professors over $200,000 per annum in salary alone. Singapore has moved effectively so as to be competitive with the USA at base level. Europe and Australia-New Zealand have not. While global rankings have secured public credibility - they are probably here to stay - there are downsides. Only a few elements of university performance can be measured comparatively. All rankings have biases. In the rush to rank order too much is inferred from these data. Data on research tell us nothing about teaching, yet the main rationale for rankings is to resource student choice! The Times Higher is just shonky. It seems designed to boost the market position of British universities. 40 per cent of the Times index is comprised by an opinion survey of academics, another 10 per cent by a survey of global employers, and the Times measures: the proportion of students that are international and the proportion of staff that are international. The surveys are non-transparent. We don t know who was surveyed, we don t know what they were asked. The student internationalisation indicator rewards volume building not student quality. Teaching quality is measured using a quantity indicator, staff-student

5 5 ratios. Research constitutes just 20 per cent of the index. Of course the Times knew what it was doing. There are four British universities in its top 20, not two as in Jiao Tong, and it reduced the number of US universities in the top 100 from 53 to 31. Quite an achievement. On the way though, it artificially boosted the performance of Australian universities. Australia has 12 universities in the Times top 100 and Canada has three - even though, arguably, Canada s universities are stronger in all areas except executive steering and the export market. Most of the U21 group did well out of the Times, but it would be a serious error to believe our own marketing on this (it always is) or to treat the Times as an accurate summary of the competitive position. It is essential that we avoid complacency. Jiao Tong is a sound data set though we might quarrel with the Nobel indicators. The problem is that to have the inside running in the Jiao Tong you need to be English speaking, largish, comprehensive in research coverage, science and medicine heavy, have a very strong graduate school, and carry few teaching only faculty. It also helps a lot to be American because Americans cite Americans. Like the Times, though with different motivations and methods, the effects of the Jiao Tong are to normalise only one model of university and to reproduce Anglo- American dominance. Rankings are a rigged game. The German technical universities, the comprehensive national universities of the type in Mexico and Argentina, the Indian IITs, and elite specialist schools everywhere are all junked. One wonders how long the leading English speaking nations will get away with blatantly staging the global competition in their own terms and own interests. Rankings systems create perverse outcomes. Two decades of the US News and World Report have produced over-spending on enrolment managers and the slippage of needs based student aid into merit aid. One rankings system that does it better is the web-based system devised by the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) and Die Zeit in Germany. This started with Germany and is being extended to the Netherlands and Denmark. It provides comparative data about university performance in each individual discipline and each facility and service that affects students: enrolment, library, IT services and so on. Using the website the rankings are customised by each individual student. Students input their own preferred list of criteria and are provided with rankings focused on their purposes. There is no holistic league table of universities: as CHE states there is no one best university across all areas, and minimal differences produced by random fluctuations may be misinterpreted as real differences. The result is a superior set of data, more comprehensive, independent and usable. There is no shortage of parties wanting to take our fate out of our hands. Research universities cannot afford to concede rankings to media companies. It is a mistake to give them to governments. They can t be run in-house. So far rankings have positioned universities. Here we might give thought to more

6 6 effective position-taking strategies, the potential of global consortia in creating honest rankings, and the role of independent agencies in data collection.