Comment on “Emerging and Near Future Challenges of Higher Education in East Asia”

Abstract

Higher education in East Asia has undergone a miraculous transformation in just over two decades since the turn of the century. Its quantitative expansion, qualitative improvement, and the rapid advances in academic productivity in this century are impressive achievements. Philip Altbach, a leading authority on comparative education research, once described Asian higher education from the perspective of dependency and neocolonialism, placing it on the “periphery” of the international knowledge and higher education system (Altbach, 2004). However, the argument that a structurally hierarchical “center-periphery” relationship exists between the Western and non-Western higher education systems has lost its relevance in the contemporary context. Although Horta (2023) argues the dynamic development of the East Asian higher education system from the perspective of massification and globalization, he mainly discusses its problems and challenges from a comprehensive and diverse range of perspectives. Having fully recognized the persuasive arguments presented, I humbly make the following three comments, particularly from the perspective of globalization and the internationalization of higher education. When considering the breakthrough of higher education in East Asia, the focal point is Chinese higher education. Horta (2023) suggests that China's and other East Asian academic production systems need to be more internationalized, noting the relatively small proportion of international co-authored publications of East Asia compared with those of Western Europe. Horta also explains its background as “the governance, organisation, understanding, and application of academic freedom among other characteristics of Chinese institutions are essentially national, shaped and associated with the Chinese political regime. Moreover, these factors may not be particularly appealing to other higher education systems in the region”. Although I completely agree with Horta's observations and arguments, a more in-depth discussion of higher education in China would allow for further consideration of the development of higher education in East Asia as a whole. For example, how was China able to achieve such rapid growth in academic research productivity without “academic freedom,” which has been deemed essential for research promotion in the history of Western academia? How can China's remarkable progress of scientific and technological research be used to solve various global issues such as preventing global warming and tackling infectious diseases collaborating with the international society in the current political and diplomatic context? East Asian intra-regional student and faculty mobility and university partnership-based cross-border activities are increasing rapidly and represent the de facto integration of higher education in the region (Kuroda & Passarelli, 2009). Policy discussions on Asian regional cooperation in higher education are progressing and becoming increasingly vigorous. Referring to Fedorova and Skobleva (2020), Horta (2023) also suggests “HEIs and accreditation agencies in East Asia may also play crucial roles in adopting new technologies, such as the ones related to blockchain, that can improve the governance of HEIs by simplifying bureaucracies and administrative processes, can produce digital academic certifications”. This is a very insightful discussion in the contemporary context, but it requires more discussion of the actual prospects and possible regional arrangements needed to achieve these innovative visions. Horta (2023) clearly indicates that “the human development model in the East Asian setting (for example, the J-Model; see Cummings & Altbach, 1997) continues to rely on strong human capital formation, STEM fields, and governments coordinating manpower and job planning as well as coordinating science and technology”. Indeed, Cummings explained the core of a human resource development strategy common throughout Asia which he named the J-model, or Japanese Model. Although recognizing that this model has no great difference from the arguments of “The East Asian Miracle” (World Bank, 1993)—which sees the cause of East Asian economic success as due to the role of strong government and human capital formation of the region and that the Japanese Model has been stagnant for last three decades, I would be most interested in how the fast development of East Asian higher education in the 21st century can be newly modeled and if there is any different understanding from the “J-model”.