Professor Amirul Islam Chowdhury
President, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh :
(From previous issue)
Globalization of Higher Education : In 1990, the public sector in Bangladesh lost its monopoly right of higher education and private sector was allowed to participate in different areas of higher education (in humanities, science, medical, engineering, and also in other areas of training, etc.). In the initial stage, a limited number of Universities and colleges came up. However, later the permit/license to establish universities/colleges became a matter of political privilege and the number kept on increasing and probably it is going to be 100 such institutions in this month. Now, tracking the number is becoming difficult. However, the practice of establishing universities in private sector is a very old practice.
I quote a long passage from Peter Manicas article Globalization and Higher education (Cambridge 2012). Like ‘globalization’, ‘higher education’ is a highly abstraction. To him, it is easy to slip into the assumption that higher education is pretty much the same as that of in the United States. But differences in the histories and political economies of the nations of the world have resulted in differences in the situation of higher education across the globe. This refers not only questions of access, funding, organization, programs and institutional variety, but questions of needs and goals. Moreover, even if one restricts one’s sight to higher education in one country, for example, the United States, there are huge differences between public and private institutions, Research universities/Liberal Arts colleges, four-year colleges/Community colleges, non-profit/for profit, pro-training schools (which offer training in trades and regulated industries, e.g. auto mechanics, tourism, etc.), online universities, corporate universities (for example, Sun Microsystems University, the University of Toyota) and finally, ‘diploma mills’, digital and otherwise. Similarly, while it is clear that ‘globalization’ is a real phenomenon, one can easily fail to acknowledge its complex and multidimensional character. Depending upon how it is characterized, globalization takes on enormous ideological freight. One popular view, well-articulated by Thomas Friedman (1999), holds that ‘globalization involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before’. Friedman (2005) has more recently coupled this idea with an idea directly relevant to higher education, the idea that ‘the earth is flat’. He quotes the co-founder of Netscape: ‘Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want.’ Reducing this process to economics and technology is one thing; whether indeed, the process is ‘inexorable’ is another, and finally, whether ‘the world is flat’ in Friedman’s sense is still another highly contestable concept”. But the world has taken it for granted and is welcomed in most of the countries. Many people take it as inevitable because of dynamism of capitalism. Some critics has termed higher education as ‘commodities’ and is guided by market mechanism like any other commodities such as, potato, soft drink or Macdonal burger.
Fast Growth of Higher Education: The most critical fact regarding higher education in the recent past is its phenomenal global post-World War II growth. Thus to take a few examples, as recently as 1980 there were some 12,000 degree-granting institutions in the US in 2004, there were 42,000 with a total enrolment of over 16 million. Since Indian independence, the number of primary schools tripled (even while illiteracy remained high at 44%, higher secondary schools increased by 18 times and the number of colleges for general education increased by 24 times. In 1950, India had 370 colleges and 27 universities, in 2002 there were 8,737 colleges and 272 universities. There are now (2011) some 320 universities, 1600 colleges instructing some 9.3 million students. China shows a similar trajectory. From 1978 to 2003 there were 1,396 institutions of higher education and more than 1,000 Private colleges with a total of over 16 million students. From 1960, enrolments increased by 10% in Indonesia, 19% in Thailand 20% in Hong Kong and 51 % in the Republic of Korea.
In Bangladesh, number of universities was only 9 in 1980s, increased to 15 in 200 I, 23 in 2006, and to 35 in 2014. Number of private Universities was 80, plus two International Universities, namely, OIC’s Islamic University of Technology Number of private Universities was 80, plus two International Universities, namely, OIC’s Islamic University of Technology and International Women University at Chittagong. The number of students in 2003 was 46,080 but went up to 1,82,641 in 2008 and the number of students studying in colleges under National university male 1,49,309, female 1,06,949 total 2,56,258 in 2014. The relevant figures/diagrams are given in Appendix A towards the end of this lecture. It is reported in UNESCO Annual Report that Bangladesh had 18,36,659 achievers of Graduate and Undergraduate degrees. Bangladesh had one of the
significant rate of enrolment in this level.
Sources of Funds for such Investments: Peter Manicas has broadly identified four sources of funds: Public funds, students’ tuitions, endowments, and funds generated by scientific research (or some would like to term it as industrial consultancy). Johnston (2001) writes ‘higher education is experiencing a worldwide shift of cost burden from government to parents and students’. This is a process supported by globalization, Americanization, often justified by the term ‘free market, neo-liberalism (Steger 2005).
A study by Merril Lynch reported that the higher education market outside the United States is worth $111 billion annually (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8th June 2002; quoted in Peter Manicas in Globalization and Higher Education). Intelligent and cunning business world took this opportunity and converted education as ‘Business’ and in the vocabulary of leftist ‘commodification’.
The elite universities both in US and UK are highly fortunate, including some in public sector but mostly in private, had huge endowments. Harvard’s endowment at the end of 2004 fiscal year was a remarkable $22.6 billion (New York Times, and May, 2005)-more than the GNPs of most nations of the third world. Such is the case of Texas A & M, University of California, these gives these institutions considerable autonomy. I wrote a piece about financing of higher education and I made an observation: Harvard is good because Harvard is rich.
It is strongly Believed and historically correct to say that there is a growth of large scale ‘Middle Class’ whose affordability to meet the increasing cost of university and other lower level of education can be met. Manicas has cited the case of Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. There were no surprises” (Manicas 2002).
Having said that we now make an enquiry for the least developed countries of the World. These countries have faced the elimination of pre-capitalist mode of production. This put these countries in real trouble. Either the children of subsistence level farmers’ children had to give up the hope to join University or needed to earn their cost by looking for a part time job to pay for University education.
“In this regard, there are huge differences between India, China the nations of South-east Asia, Russia, Middle East. A move to a radical politics is often the response (Kepel 2003) with its high literacy, ‘it is not uncommon to find bus drivers who are engineers or who had multiple master’s degrees or law degrees’ in Kerala (had a socialist government, Neelkantan 2005b). China most certainly will produce increasingly large numbers of well-educated persons and, like India, it will increasingly become an important player in the global political economy. Most of the nations of Africa, tragically, remain in a poverty quagmire (Manicas 2002).
Manicas has disagreed with the forecast made by Friedman’s idea of the flattening earth: that the well-educated of the advanced of the industrial societies will be replaced by well-educated elites in the developing world or that in the foreseeable future, the United States will become a minor player in the global political economy. Neither is likely” (Manicas 2002).
Harvey, a renowned geographer and Marxist observed, “current information technology has joined with what has been called ‘flexible accumulation making it possible, among other things, that ‘intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again-and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature.’ Friedman continues: , and what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.’ This is what is ‘Symbiotic analysis’ as termed by Robert Reich (Quoted in Ritz, Cambridge 2007). But both ideas overlook obvious objections as opposed by Friedman.
He put his arguments. First, we are speaking about a tiny minority of workers in the global political economy. Most work is not ‘intellectual’ and it will not become so. Second, as wages rise ‘outsourced’ become less attractive. White Collar employees in developing countries whatever initial advantages they had over those in the dominant corporations starts falling. Third, most of the work done by even the technologically sophisticated will remain low-paid and mostly uninteresting. Historically, while technological innovations in manufacturing did require that new skills be learned, overall, the result was a deskilling of workers (Granovetter and Tilly 1988).
(To be continued
