Expansion of Higher Education

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Chapter 2. Literature Review

The international migration of students today takes place within widely expanded, marketized, and internationalized higher education systems. The current status of higher education systems today has followed many other changes in the global political economy since the end of World War II. This literature review covers the relevant scholarship on the expansion, marketization, and internationalization of higher education in the

globalized economy, especially as these phenomena relate to the global mobility of students. This body of literature is then placed in the context of the wider scholarship on migration frameworks and theory. This chapter then presents the push-pull framework of international student mobility and concludes by reviewing relevant existing studies that have applied the framework globally and to the Asia Pacific Region.

2.1. Expansion of Higher Education

While the concept of the university has survived since the middle ages, the university’s form, function, and role in society has changed dramatically as more people have demanded and gained access to institutions of higher education, especially in the period following World War II.¹ In terms of access, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Higher Education Programme provides the following data for 2015-2016 on the participation of young people in higher education:

Based on current patterns of graduation, an average of 35% of today’s young people across OECD countries is expected to graduate from tertiary education at least once before the age of 30, some 57% are expected to enter a bachelor’s degree of equivalent programme, and 22% are expected to enter a master’s degree or equivalent programme over their lifetime.

On average across OECD countries, 54% of new entrants into tertiary education are women, and 82% are under the age of 25. In addition some 13% of all entrants are international students.²

These data illustrate how higher education is becoming more widely attainable and, in some places, even becoming an expectation among young people. The OECD

1 Sarah Guri-Rosenblit, Helena Šebková, and Ulrich Teichler, “Massification and Diversity of higher Education Systems: Interplay of Complex Dimensions,” Higher Education Policy, vol. 20, 2007, p. 373.

2 Cláudia Sarrico, “Chapter 1: Higher Education Today,” in Andrew McQueen and Shane Samuelson, eds., State of Higher Education: 2015-16 (Paris: OECD Higher Education Programme, 2017), 4.

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report further notes that in all but two OECD countries, “the share of younger adults (25-34 olds) with tertiary qualifications is larger than that of older adults (55-64 year-olds) with that level of qualification.”³ This generational difference illustrates the rapid and recent nature of mass higher education participation and tertiary degree attainment.

Martin Trow’s 1973 analysis of massification in higher education identified three forms of higher education: elite, mass, and universal.⁴ In the transition from an elite (15 percent or less of the relevant age cohort participating in higher education) to mass (15 to 50 percent) system of higher education, the role of tertiary education shifts from building up the character and minds of a small, elite class to transmitting skills to a larger proportion of the population in preparation for economic vocational roles. When reaching universal levels (over 50 percent relevant cohort participation), higher education encompasses nearly all members of the relevant population and becomes viewed as an obligation for individuals, even when not compulsory.⁵

These trends of massification and expansion in higher education systems are not limited to the developed and industrialized countries. Philip G. Altbach, one of the foremost scholars of comparative and international higher education, notes that since the end of World War II, expansion in higher education accelerated across nearly all

countries, regardless of level of economic development.⁶ In this process, higher education institutions have grown in size, number, and function to match the needs and demands of industrializing economies. The massification of higher education has occurred in tandem with economic globalization as economies in both the developed and developing world have transitioned from manufacturing and industry-based economies to a larger emphasis on services and the knowledge sector: Altbach notes that today’s interdependent service and knowledge economies increasingly rely on a highly-trained work force, which institutions of higher education are increasingly expected to provide.⁷

Shifting from the macro-economic level to the individual level, increased

participation and demand for tertiary education may be explained through human capital

3 Ibid.

4 Martin Trow, Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education, (Berkeley, CA: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Reprint, 1973), p. 2.

5 Martin Trow, “Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII,” in James J.F. Forrest and Philip G. Altbach, eds., International Handbook of Higher Education, (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), p. 243.

6 Philip G. Altbach, Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University, and Development, (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 1998), p. 7.

7 Altbach, op. cit., p. 8.

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theory. First articulated in the 1960s by American scholar Gary S. Becker, human capital theory posits that individuals who invest in the development of their own human capital by completing a university degree will have an advantage in the labor market, therefore earning more in their lifetime despite the immediate costs of pursuing higher education.⁸ Rather than the accumulation of physical capital through earning wages, higher education serves the purpose of enhancing one’s human resources. This theory has generally proven true; the aforementioned OECD report found that the average university graduate reaps many financial benefits, including increased earnings and decreased likelihood of unemployment.⁹ A recent review of private and social returns on investment in higher education attainment commissioned by the World Bank finds that the private return on investment (in the form of income) remained high over the past decade, with higher returns for people in low-income countries compared to middle and high income countries.¹⁰

In today’s societies, tertiary education gives graduates the necessary certifications for many high-level and powerful roles in both the public and private sectors of the economy, contributing to the common perspective that higher education is an investment for one’s future private gains. Altbach and others have furthermore linked economic liberalization in many countries to the growth of a middle class which views higher education as the key to success and social mobility: these middle classes in industrialized economies in turn demand better access to higher education, believing that tertiary education serves the purpose of providing training for relevant jobs.¹¹

2.1.2 Diversification in Institutions

While expansion has occurred in access for populations around the globe, expansion has also occurred in the of form, function, and level of higher education institutions. Ulrich Teichler views diversity in higher education systems in terms of four major areas of classification: (1) knowledge, addressing the substance of the material taught and researched, (2) processes and people by which knowledge is disseminated and

8 Gary S. Becker, “Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 70, no. 9, 1962, p. 9.

9 Cláudia Sarrico, op. cit., pp. 9-14.

10 George Psacharopoulos and Harry Antony Patrinos, Returns to Investment in Education: A Decennial Review of the Global Literature, Policy Research Working Paper, no. WPS 8402, Washington, DC:

World Bank Group, 2018, pp. 11-12.

11 Philip G. Altbach, op. cit., p. 9, 12.

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to whom, (3) organizational matters that involve macro-level supervision, control, and accountability issues, and (4) quantitative-structural issues, which refer to the size and shape of the overall higher education system.¹²

Tertiary-level vocational schools, research institutions, community colleges, junior colleges, liberal arts schools, and polytechnic institutions today may all fall within or outside higher education systems, depending on a variety of system boundaries that vary from country to country. Guri-Rosenblit et al speak of higher education systems defined by internal and external boundaries that give these systems horizontal and vertical structure, determining the types of institutions that a government considers as part of the system. External boundaries place limits from the outside on the system, such as laws that define the types of institutions included in the system, while internal boundaries reflect differences between institutions in dimensions such as types of programs or level of degrees offered.¹³ This diversification in higher education systems worldwide has been made possible by deep-cutting changes in the state’s role in providing and funding tertiary education; the privatization of higher educational services and operations are explored in the following section.