Globalization and Higher Education

Post-secondary education is a massive globalizing industry with a potential for growth that cannot be overestimated. By 2010 there will be 100 million people in the world, all fully qualified to proceed from secondary to tertiary education, but there will be no room left on any campus. A distinguished panel of scholars and educational administrators from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific was asked to speak on the complexities of globalized higher education from their positions of concern and expertise and then engage in a dialogue. The result is this timely and important work. Throughout, contributors address a number of difficult questions: Do the processes of global capitalism fundamentally challenge the inherited forms of the University? How should the use and nature of markets be conceived and how are they related? What is the appropriate pedagogy for the new technologies and what are its limits? If growing participation in higher education is an overriding good, should this be conceived in terms of fulfilling human capacities, realizing national goals, or attaining employment skills? Questions regarding the goals of higher education and their accomplishment lead to deeper ones concerning the very idea of knowledge and the distinction - increasingly difficult to draw - between knowing in the theoretical mode, knowing in the practical mode, knowing as an essentially reflective process, and, finally, the view that there are alternative ways of knowing. This volume aims to energize readers into rethinking higher education. It succeeds by dealing thoughtfully and provocatively with pertinent issues that cut across and transcend national boundaries as well as very different points of view.