Higher education today confronts several challenges, including those of language and linguistic contradictions, cultural diversity in approaches to learning, traditions of academic writing and knowledge production, privatisation and selective inclusion due to the demand for fees, concerns around citizenship and civic education and changing youth aspirations, to name a few. More generally, it has to cope with a surge in demand coming particularly from emerging countries such as China and India. Alongside this, there have been pressures to conform to global norms and quality standards in terms of outcomes and achievements. Responses have varied from an exclusion of the socially and educationally underprivileged to strategies aimed at creatively accommodating diversity. This open issue, dealing with student mobility and learning in a globalised world, directly confronts some of these issues.
The first paper, by Robin Shields, entitled ‘Reconsidering regionalisation in global higher education: Student mobility spaces of the European Higher Education Area’, examines international student mobility between member states of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a group of 47 countries that committed to reforming their higher education systems to improve the comparability and compatibility of degrees. While increased student mobility is a key goal in its official documents, little research has empirically investigated student mobility patterns in respect to the EHEA. The analysis employs multivariate techniques to identify trends in student mobility between 1999 and 2009, using a spatial approach to visualise the relationships between member states as constituted through student mobility flows. Results show that within the analysis timeframe, student flows in the EHEA became more even in their distribution, but that in terms of the relationships between states, the EHEA became more centralised and segmented, meaning that key actors mediated exchanges between peripheral states, and the region was more easily divided into self-contained clusters. These trends indicate a need to critically reconsider the nature of the EHEA and its role in the globalisation of higher education.
The second paper, by Yusuke Sakurai, Anna Parpala, Kirsi Pyhältö and Sari Lindblom-Ylänne, ‘Engagement in learning: A comparison between Asian and European international university students’, moves on to examine the associations between international students’ approaches to learning, factors in the teaching/learning environment and self-assessed academic outcomes across Asian and European students. A total of 307 students were surveyed. Their experience of the purposefulness of their course assignments and the relevance of their studies was positively related to students having a deep approach to learning and being organised in their studies. Furthermore, the better students’ perception of how well their courses were organised and aligned with other studies, the lower their stress level was. The Asian students in the study exhibited a slightly more surface approach to learning, and were more organised in their studies than the European students, but the differences were very small.
The next three papers move on to addressing different dimensions of citizenship, especially social citizenship, and how inequalities in the education system can reproduce differences in voting patterns that reflect citizenship aspirations. Melanie Walker and Sonja Loots, in their paper ‘Social citizenship formation at university: A South African case study’, consider citizenship formation at universities, drawing on the example of a student leadership project at the University of the Free State, a formerly White South African university. This is a higher education context and society where racialised difference continues to influence peer relationships. The paper proposes a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of social citizenship based on T.H. Marshall and enriched by the capabilities approach, which adds specific citizenship dimensions of deliberation, acknowledgment of heterogeneity and agency goals and activities as core elements of being able to be and to do as citizens. This is operationalised by investigating the student development intervention, based on biographical interview data from 50 of the 71 students who participated in the first iteration of the programme. The paper notes that if students are given the opportunity to interact with those who differ from themselves, and to develop a deeper understanding of where privilege and disadvantage originate and are shaped, these might provide a platform that expands their citizenship-agency to make a difference in the realms of deliberation, diversity and civic action.
The next paper, by Bryony Hoskins, Germ Janmaat, Christine Han and Daniel Muijs, ‘Inequalities in the education system and the reproduction of socioeconomic disparities in voting in England, Denmark and Germany: The influence of country context, tracking and self-efficacy on voting intentions of students age 16–18’, explicitly examines the role of educational institutions, in this case high schools, in reproducing inequalities as reflected in voting intentions of students. This article performs exploratory research using a mixed-methods approach (structural equation modelling and a thematic analysis of interview data) to analyse the ways in which socioeconomic disparities in voting patterns are reproduced through inequalities in education in different national contexts, and the role of self-efficacy in this process. The evidence suggests that in Germany and England, students with lower socioeconomic status (SES) have lower levels of general self-efficacy, and this is reinforced through early experiences of inequalities in the education system, such as within- or between-school selection. Low levels of general self-efficacy are then found to reduce political self-efficacy and voting intentions. In Germany and England, it is these students who enter initial vocational education and training (IVET). The experience of IVET then reinforces the distinctions in civic engagement, probably either through peer socialisation and/or curriculum differences. In Denmark, where SES has a weaker association with track placement, the experience of being placed in IVET plays a stronger role in reducing political self-efficacy and voting intentions.
The third paper on citizenship, by Mark Baildon, Jasmine Sim and Agnes Paculdar, entitled ‘A tale of two countries: Comparing civic education in the Philippines and Singapore’, provides a comparative analysis of citizenship education in the Philippines and Singapore. Through an analysis of historical contexts, citizenship education policy and curriculum it examines Makabayan in the Philippines and National Education in Singapore. It identifies particular policy and curriculum trajectories as responses to national and global imperatives to demonstrate how countries are redefining the kinds of knowledge, skills and values deemed necessary for national citizenship in global contexts. This comparative case study illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions facing citizenship education in new global contexts and highlights the different ways countries try to manage these tensions through citizenship education policies and curricula.
The final two papers examine issues related to language and privatisation, respectively. Stephanie Kim, in ‘English is for dummies: Linguistic contradictions at an international college in South Korea’, critically examines the ways in which, under the slogan of internationalisation, Korean universities have opened international colleges as a way to better attract and accommodate foreign students. However, due to a lack of foreign student recruiting capability, the majority of the students who enrol at one such international college are not foreign, but Korean. Contradictions arise when the English language medium enforced by the foreign faculty members of the college conflicts with the linguistic practices of the mostly Korean student body. This article uses an international college in South Korea as a case study for the examination of the role of English on student life at Asian universities pursuing internationalisation strategies via the recruitment of foreign faculty members. Paradoxically, by establishing an international college that aggressively enforces the English language medium, the Korean university has created an environment where students avoid using English at all.
Finally, Gustavo Gregorutti, Oscar Espinoza, Luis González and Javier Loyola discuss the implications of privatisation of higher education in their paper ‘What if privatising higher education becomes an issue? The case of Chile and Mexico’. Over the last 30 years, Chile and Mexico have been implementing neoliberal policies to reform their higher education systems. This paper compares the development and impact of these policies within three main areas in both countries, namely, the trends and characteristics of the growing private higher education sector; commercialisation and business-like trends that private academia is experiencing; and, finally, the tense situations created vis-a-vis assessment and accrediting agencies that seek to ensure quality in the private higher education systems. The paper discusses the challenges confronted by private higher education in both nations as a result of an uncritical implementation of neoliberal policies, an unregulated legislation that allows many private institutions to profit, the lack of a comprehensive system of quality assessment, and the mismatch between enrolment and the initial goal of advancing economic development through strengthening human resources capacities.
Additionally, we have three book reviews in this issue. The Editors welcome contributions to the Compare Forum, an arena for open discussion of key emergent issues and debates in the fields of international and comparative education.
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