Philip G. Altbach is Research Professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He is the 2013 winner of the Houlihan award for distinguished contributions to international education by NAFSA and the distinguished career award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He was the 2004–2006 Distinguished Scholar Leader for the New Century Scholars initiative of the Fulbright program, and in 2010 was an Erudite Scholar of the Government of Kerala in India. A recent book, coedited with Jamil Salmi, is The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities. He is author of Turmoil and Transition: The International Imperative in Higher Education, Comparative Higher Education, Student Politics in America, and other books. He coedited the International Handbook of Higher Education. Other recent books are World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America, Leadership for World-Class Universities: Challenges for Developing Countries and Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution.

Global Trends in Higher Education:
Current Realities and Future Prospects

The latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have been characterized by almost unprecedented change in higher education globally—one might even characterize these changes as an academic revolution. Two key themes—massification and the emergence of the global knowledge economy—have been the key drivers of this revolution. Among the key results have been the growth of the private higher education sector, the privatization of public higher education in many countries, the expansion of internationalization in its many aspects, the role of English as the dominant language for science and scholarship, and others. Future prospects, while of course difficult to discern, likely include further elaboration of the trends mentioned here, plus increased differentiation of higher education sectors, growing commercialization, the expansion of distance education, and others.

“Student engagement in time of transformation"

Abstract:
In principle, students have always been ‘at the heart of the [higher education] system’, but their experience and the way they engage with their own learning and with other actors within higher education have changed profoundly since the emergence of the first medieval universities. There was a time when sovereign power resided in the student body and students effectively controlled the university. And there has been a much longer history of students joining the guild of professors in deciding on university matters through a student rector - a young master – and later through student representatives. Students have also historically engaged in social and ideological movements such as nationalism, liberalism and radicalism. In brief, given their particular social status and intellectual habitus, students have often been a vibrant social and political force within and outside their higher education communities.

My presentation will focus on contemporary developments in higher education, and their ideological underpinnings, insofar as they have important implications for student experience and engagement: massification, globalisation, technological innovations, and the rise of neo-liberal conceptions of higher education. These developments can be traced in policy documents and discourses accompanying recent higher education reforms. The concrete questions I seek to answer is how students are conceived within contemporary policy discourses. What do policy discourses about giving ‘students more choice’ and ‘a stronger voice’ tell us about current conceptions of students and student engagement? And how do these conceptions vary if we take into account the different national and regional contexts? How do they vary if we come to recognize that ‘a student’ is far from being a single-faceted agent?

Biography

Dr Manja Klemenčič

Researcher in Higher Education at Harvard University and Adjunct Researcher at Centre for Educational Policy Studies, University of Ljubljana

Web: http://scholar.harvard.edu/manja_klemencic

Trained as a political scientist, Manja Klemencic works in the area of higher education studies, focusing on questions of student experience and engagement, academic profession, institutional research and internationalisation. Her other research areas include European civil society (student organisations and movements) and European Union politics. Manja obtained her PhD in International Studies at University of Cambridge. She has held research fellowships at Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, and Centre for Social Science Research in Berlin.

Her publications include several articles and book chapters, amongst them also guest editing two special issues with lead articles on student representation in Western European and in global perspective. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Student Power in Europe and co-editing a volume on Student engagement in Europe. Manja is Associate Editor of European Journal of Higher Education, Editorial Board member of the Journal of Higher Education and Finance, and a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of Journal of Student Affairs in Africa. From 1999 to 2001, Manja served two terms as Secretary General of the European Students’ Union.