Simon Marginson

Loneliness and International Students: An Australian Study

In a study of international student security, consisting of 200 intensive interviews with students, resident onshore in Australia, it was found that two thirds of the group had experienced problems of loneliness and/or isolation, especially in the early months. According to Weiss, students experience both personal loneliness because of the loss of contact with families and social loneliness because of the loss of networks. Both forms of loneliness are at times exacerbated by their experiences in institutional sites. The article discusses the coping mechanisms that students use. It identifies a third kind of loneliness experienced by international students, cultural loneliness, triggered by the absence of the preferred cultural and/or linguistic environment. This can affect even students with adequate personal and social support. Thus, same-culture networks are often crucial for international students. Yet same-culture networks are not a universal panacea: They cannot substitute for adequate pastoral care by universities or ensure satisfactory engagement with local cultures, so some causes of cultural loneliness often remain. The article concludes that the creation of stronger bonds between international and local students in the educational setting, helping international students to remake their own cultural maps on their own terms, is key to a forward move on loneliness.

To Rank or to be Ranked: The Impact of Global Rankings in Higher Education

Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single “league table” for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector. Both the research rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings by the Times Higher Education Supplement have been widely publicised and already appear to have generated incentives in favour of greater system stratification and the concentration of elite researchers. However, global comparisons are possible only in relation to one model of institution, that of the comprehensive research intensive university, and for the most part are tailored to science-strong and English-speaking universities. Neither the Shanghai nor the Times rankings provide guidance on the quality of teaching. It is important to secure “clean” rankings, transparent, free of self-interest, and methodologically coherent, that create incentives to broad-based improvement.

Competition and Markets in Higher Education: A ‘Glonacal’ Analysis

Higher education — particularly the research-intensive university, which is the focus of this article — is the subject of global/national/local effects, and is shaped by hierarchy and uneven development on a world scale. The article theorises social competition in higher education, and traces inter-university competition and stratification on the national and global planes with the help of figures and tables. It argues that social competition is much broader than economic exchange, but in the neo-liberal era marketisation is becoming more important, particularly cross-border markets. Globalisation and markets together are changing the competition for status goods (positional goods) in higher education. The competition is becoming more ‘economised’ because mediated by private capacity to pay, and intensified because there is diminished attention to public good objectives such as equality of opportunity: in any case transnational markets are configured as a trading environment where such objectives are irrelevant. The outcome is the steepening of university hierarchies, the formation of a ‘winner-take-all’ world market in elite and mostly American university education, a tighter fit between social hierarchy and educational hierarchy at the national level, and global patterns of domination/subordination that are as yet scarcely modified by global public goods. This suggests the need to rework the equality of the educational project and situate it globally as well as nationally.

After globalization: emerging politics of education

Globalization refers to the formation of world systems, as distinct from internationalization which presupposes nations as the essential unit. Globalization includes finance and trade; communications and information technologies; migration and tourism; global societies; linguistic, cultural and ideological convergence; and world systems of signs and images. While it does not negate the nation-state, it changes its circumstances and potentials. In the global era, government continues to be largely national in form, and education is, if anything, more central to government, while issues of identity and difference become more important in the politics of education.

Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education

This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu’s notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position‐taking; drawing on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu’s reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self‐determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and ‘scapes’. The dynamics of Bourdieu’s competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests.

Global University Rankings: Implications in general and for Australia

Global university rankings have arrived, and though still in a process of rapid evolution, they are likely to substantially influence the long‐term development of higher education across the world. The inclusions, definitions, methods, implications and effects are of great importance. This paper analyses and critiques the two principal rankings systems prepared so far, the research rankings prepared by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings from the Times Higher Education Supplement. It goes on to discuss the divergence between them in the performance of Australian universities, draws attention to the policy implications of rankings, and canvasses the methodological difficulties and problems. It concludes by advocating the system of university comparisons developed by the Centre for Higher Educational Development (CHE) in Germany. This evades most of the problems and perverse effects of the other rankings systems, particularly reputational and whole‐of‐institution rankings. It provides data more directly useful to and controlled by prospective students, and more relevant to teaching and learning.

Global Position and Position Taking: The Case of Australia.

From 1990 to 2003, Australia’s share of the global market in cross-border degrees grew from 1% to 9%. Full fee-paying foreign students now constitute one quarter of enrolments, and education is Australia’s third largest services export. Positioned as an Anglo-American system on the edge of Asia, Australia has differentiated itself from the United States and United Kingdom on price, location, safety, and climate, not academic content. The supply side keys to growth are deregulation and prolonged reductions in the public funding of universities. However, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University survey of research performance finds that Australia is less strong in research than cross-border degrees. Australia’s policy may have negative implications for its longer-term global standing and limit the range of position-taking strategies available to its universities. These themes are explored in the context of the emerging worldwide market and Australian policy changes that have enhanced institutional stratification.

Higher Education and Public Good

Discussion about the purposes and benefits of higher education has been stymied by a particular construction of the relation between private and public benefits now dominant in policy circles and public debate. In this reading of higher education, the private and public benefits are rhetorically juxtaposed on a zero sum basis, while the individual benefits are defined as solely private and in economic terms. In liberal Western societies, in which limiting the role of the state is the central problem of politics, and individual freedoms tend to be positioned as outside both state and society, the collective conditions (‘social benefits’) provided by higher education are seen as exclusive of the individual benefits. These collective benefits are shadowy, undefined. Given that in liberal Western societies—especially English-speaking societies—understandings of the public good(s) created by higher education have become ideologically ‘frozen’, so that the public good can scarcely be identified, this suggests the need to look beyond liberal Western jurisdictions for fresh insights and conceptual frameworks. Notions of the role of government and of universities, the ‘social’, ‘community’, individual and collective, and public good, vary considerably between different traditions of higher education, for example the Nordic, German, Russian, Latin American and Chinese traditions as well as those in the United States and the Westminster countries. There is no good reason to treat the Anglo-American approach to public/private as the sum of all possibilities. By comparing the different approaches to ‘public good’ in higher education that have evolved across the world, generic elements can be identified, and a common language of public good developed. This also makes it possible to establish a broad-based notion of specifically global public goods.

National and global competition in higher education

In the long building of the Australian public university system after World War Two, there were two aspects of the policies designed to provide equality of educational opportunity: the conditions governing student participation, and the conditions governing educational supply. The former received most of the direct attention, but the latter was equally important. The conditions governing participation included the cost of tuition, and scholarships and living allowances. Thus the Whitlam government of 1972–1975 expanded and equalised access by abolishing tertiary tuition fees and providing living allowance support to half of the student population. Even at the end of the Whitlam years in 1975, university education was still the activity of a relatively small minority, with only about 15 per cent of those who finished school going straight to university. In equality politics the emphasis was always on the quantitative expansion of places, the socioeconomic composition of participation, and measures to broaden the access provided to the most disadvantaged groups. Here the ultimate horizon of equality of opportunity policy, so difficult to achieve, was to eliminate all social bias in entry so that the social composition of the tertiary student population would mirror that of the general community.

The impossibility of capitalist markets in higher education

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocative efficiency or the commodity form. There is commercial tuition only in parts of vocational training and international education. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not very important. At the most, there are regulated quasi-markets, as in post-Browne UK. This differs from the experience of privatisation and commercialisation of transport, communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. The article argues that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (public goods, status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that market reform is utopian, and the abstract ideal is sustained for exogenous policy reasons (e.g. fiscal reduction, state control, ordering of contents). But, if capitalist markets are clearly unachievable, a more authentic modernisation agenda is needed.