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Global competition and public goods in higher education: Simon Marginson
This is the full text of Professor Simon Marginson's address to the National Tertiary Education Union's Future of Higher Education Conference, held at the University of Sydney on February 22 and 23. Marginson considers the balance between the public good and private interest in a globally competitive world.
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Interesting article with some merit but I fail to see it identify new core solutions. A key problem we appear to have is the quandary of accessing the shorter term economic benefits of Asia through the education sector whilst at the same acknowledging assisting the erosion of our own longer term standards over time, particularly as Asian nations invest more funding and more money into their own institutions as we cut ours (consistent with the stated, increasingly bizarre, yet isolated, capitalist view taking hold here, surely a reflection we no longer value education as something culturally important). No amount of collaboration on its own will stave the damaging effects of this over time (rather may accentuate in a cost-cutting culture we currently have). Its only a matter of time where we will find our students undertaking their full degrees overseas in Asia rather than here purely based on quality and merit as we fight over increasing costs. Cooperation and collaboration has been happening for many years and will purely by necessity continue to increase – its clearly not enough.