Prospects for Higher Education in the Midst of Globalization

Abstract

The prospects of higher education in the Asian region tend to focus on issues of financing, managing, and ensuring quality of higher education systems especially as higher education expands and diversifies, and the unit costs keep rising. A critical policy question becomes: how can countries continue to finance their higher education systems? This issue becomes even more critical as Asian societies pass through three progressive stages of demographic change as they have over the past 60 years, beginning from rapidly expanding populations to those that peak and then begin to age in the presence of declining birth rates. Higher education responds to these changes, and as we have already witnessed with several countries, moves into a critical change where excess higher education capacity exists in a global context of continued higher education massification. The chapter examines the particular role that quality plays in this process. In addition, the dynamics of globalization seemingly inevitably move higher education into the area of its own internationalization.