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Volume 12, Issue 1  
REGIONAL NEWS
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
RESEARCH
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REGIONAL NEWS
China’s system of higher education has undergone some significant administrative changes following the reshuffling of government ministries and commissions last September.
The nine ministerial departments that formerly oversaw the country’s 93 regular universities and 72 higher-learning institutions for self-study have all been merged into the State Economic and Trade Commission.
All but two of the regular universities will now be administered jointly by both the central government and local municipalities.
The exceptions, China Mineral Industry University and the North China Mineral Technical School, are still being administered by the Ministry of Coal Industry, albeit on a temporary basis.
Some of the 72 higher-learning institutions for self study currently sponsored by the central government will be incorporated into regular universities or turned into special education training institutions. Others will come under the jurisdiction of local governments.
The plans for the restructuring of higher education were drafted by China’s State Council and were successfully implemented for the first time in the Henan and Jiangsu provinces.
The aim of the new system is to encourage universities, higher-learning institutions and postsecondary schools to recruit students at the local level in order to train and educate them for the promotion of regional socioeconomic development.
However, schools that emphasize industrial programs will continue to recruit students nationally.
— China Daily
For several years now, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has prided itself on turning out most of the subcontinent’s leaders in business and high-tech.
In more recent years, however, increasing numbers of IIT graduates have gone abroad to achieve global prominence in American corporations like Citigroup, US Airway’s Group, McKinsey & Co. and Sun Microsystems.
Much of IIT’s success can be attributed to its tough standards and highly selective admissions process, not to mention the grinding curriculum students have to endure during their four years of study there.
Each May, following several years of preparation work, more than 100,000 aspiring IIT students take the entrance exams hoping to secure a place for themselves in the next freshman class. Out of that number, only 2,500 are accepted annually.
Once they make it past the grueling admissions process, however, the work becomes even tougher with less than 2,000 making it to graduation.
On average, students get only about five hours of sleep a night and, even with round the clock studying, few score higher than a “B” on tests and exams.
The faculty to student ratio is impressive even by American standards.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for example, maintains a 1:11 ratio while IIT’s ratio fluctuates between 1:6 and 1:8.
Since its founding in 1951, IIT has branched out all over the country, setting up campuses in Kanpur, Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Guwahati.
Through the years, the institute has received funding from UNESCO, the United States, the former Soviet Union and Germany.
Moreover, it enjoys substantial aid from the Indian government, which pays the lion’s share of the $3,000 it costs annually to enroll each student.
Because of the limited opportunities offered by the Indian job market, an increasing number of IIT graduates head to the United States. In 1998, for instance, 30 percent of the graduating class, or 500 students, immigrated to the United States in search of more lucrative job prospects.
More than 80 percent of them ended up landing positions in California’s Silicon Valley, which has served as a mecca for Indian computer science graduates since the 1970s.
Of the 2,000 or so successful high-tech executives in Silicon Valley, 40 percent cite India as their country of origin and at least half of these are IIT alumni.
Many of IIT’s graduates come to the United States specifically to pursue advanced university degrees at places like MIT and Stanford.
Upon completing master’s and doctoral programs in fields like computer science and business, they are eagerly scooped up by many of America’s top corporations.
Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Cirrus Logic constitute only a partial listing of companies where IIT graduates have made it big in recent years.
— Business Week
While there are a handful of first-rate colleges and technical institutes in India, the overall picture of the country’s system of higher education is pretty bleak, according to a recent New York Times article.
Allahabad University, for example, used to be known as the Oxford of the subcontinent during the heady days immediately following India’s independence.
Since then, the school’s buildings have fallen into disrepair, overcrowding and a lack of funding have brought down its standards, and its curriculum is in shambles with courses often being postponed indefinitely.
In short, Allahabad is symptomatic in many ways of the deteriorating state of higher education throughout the country.
During the last 20 years, the mushrooming population — currently approaching 1 billion — has necessitated building 500 new colleges and universities to accommodate the increasing demand for higher education.
Although only 3 percent of Indians between the ages of 17 and 23 are enrolled in college, that still leaves 17 million students to educate.
At least part of the overcrowding problem at Indian universities can be attributed to their easy accessibility.
The entrance requirements are not particularly challenging and tuition is heavily subsidized by the state, with most students paying as little as $10 a year.
Moreover, despite government subsidized tuition, only 3.7 percent of India’s gross domestic product is earmarked each year for education.
While this figure is high compared with the rest of Southeast Asia, it is low compared to developing countries as a whole.
But whether the blame can be placed on India’s failure to prioritize education or on the millions of ill-prepared students who are packed into the country’s overcrowded colleges and universities each year, many agree on one thing: The deteriorating state of higher education is the price Indians have to pay for educating the masses.
— New York Times It was just more than a decade ago that the first expatriate colleges were established in Peshawar, Pakistan, to educate the increasing number of refugees fleeing the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
In 1988 the Umha-tul-Momineen University was set up as an all women’s college while the Islamic University opened its doors as a coed institution.
Hiwad University was founded last year as the newest refugee school in Peshawar and largely accommodates women who have escaped from Taliban-held areas in Afghanistan.
Ahmad Shah Abdali University was formed in 1993 by a group of exiled professors from Kabul University. By far the largest of these institutions, Ahmad Shah offers degree programs in agriculture, engineering and medicine. Its law school gives students a choice of studying British-style law or traditional Islamic law (sharia).
Late last August, however, the Pakistani government closed down all four of these refugee universities claiming they were operating illegally and did not meet the national standards for higher education.
University administrators and human rights activists, on the other hand, cite the government’s desire to repatriate the refugees back to Afghanistan as the real reason behind the closures.
Whatever the case may be, the shutdown is bad news for many Afghans who fled their war-ravaged country and the repressive policies of the current Taliban government. There are presently 1.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan with the majority residing in Peshawar.
Representatives of the universities are also convinced that the Taliban had a hand in the closures as the latter has repeatedly accused the campuses of becoming hotbeds of dissidence against the fledgling regime in Afghanistan.
As the Taliban movement sprung out of the Koranic schools in Peshawar, its members remain highly suspicious of educational systems that smack of westernization and secularism.
Most of the 88 faculty members at Ahmad Shah Abdali University, for example, earned their doctorates in the United States, Europe or Canada.
The fact that many of them taught in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation makes them doubly suspect in the eyes of the country’s Islamist rulers.
All four of the refugee universities are partially supported by grants from international donors and aid organizations.
Tuition is largely affordable with students paying between $5 and $10 a month depending on the type of program they choose to enroll in.
Moreover, these institutions are formally recognized by the Afghan Refugees Commission and their curricula meet UNESCO standards.
— Chronicle of Higher Education
Two trends are currently changing the shape of higher education in Malaysia: the “corporatization” of the country’s public universities and the proliferation of private colleges linked to western institutions of higher education abroad.
The first stems from efforts to curb the financial dependency of Malaysian universities on the state. With the introduction of universal secondary education 10 years ago, public universities have been hard pressed to meet the rising demand for college degrees.
Hence, in January of 1998, the University of Malaysia became the first of the country’s eight public universities to become “corporatized.”
Under the new system, universities are given the freedom to acquire investment shares, take out loans from private institutions and set up business ventures.
The state retains control over most of the assets held by universities and continues to provide funding for new programs and projects. However, the universities assume responsibility for financing the bulk of their operating costs.
In addition to the trend towards corporatization, the government has also lifted many of the restrictions on the country’s private colleges during the past decade, allowing them to expand their programs and enrollments to an unprecedented level.
Because it was formerly illegal for private institutions to confer degrees, many of them set up joint programs with foreign universities that allowed Malaysian students to complete their studies overseas.
The globalization of higher education has encouraged universities in the technologically advanced countries to expand by offering their programs on a franchise basis to the developing world.
However, critics warn that the trend towards international education in Malaysia and elsewhere (with its emphasis on English, western values and attitudes) threatens to undermine the country’s cultural identity.
To safeguard against this concern, the government has taken measures to ensure that the system of higher education reflects the national character of the country.
Private colleges are required to teach the majority of their courses in English and their curricula must include courses in Islamic studies and Asian civilizations.
— International Higher Education
Foreign enrollment in Australian universities continued to grow this year despite the recent economic upheavals in neighboring Asia.
The number of international students has been climbing steadily for the past decade or so, reaching 86,000 in 1998.
This represents a 14 percent increase over last year according to IDP Education Australia, the country’s official overseas recruitment agency.
However, 20,000 of these students take classes at the so-called “offshore” campuses institutionally linked to Australian universities, and 6,000 are pursuing Australian degrees through “distance-education programs” based in their home countries.
Although offshore students may indeed contribute to the continuing upward trend in foreign enrollment, the 60,000 or so foreigners actually studying on Australian soil this year still represent a 10-percent increase over 1997.
For some schools, 1998 was a record year in this respect. The University of New South Wales, for instance, currently enrolls more international students than any other institution of higher education in the world: 5,167 compared with the 4,964 who attended New York University in 1997-98.
In short, Australian universities have had to devise new strategies to retain and attract foreign students in a changing market.
Not only have they stepped up recruiting and marketing in North America and Scandinavia, they have also reached out to parts of Asia that have not yielded significant numbers of students in the past.
Yet by far the biggest change in strategy aimed at reeling in foreign students has been the offshore or “twinning” programs offered by Australian institutions of higher education.
These programs allow Asians to study for one or two years at their home institutions before transferring to complete their studies at an Australian university.
The major benefit of the offshore campuses is that Asian students can earn degrees from Australian universities for considerably less money.
The success of these programs has been phenomenal, with the number of offshore campuses growing over the past decade from nine to 390.
But while most of Australia’s four-year institutions have succeeded in cushioning themselves against the fallout from the Asian crisis, enrollment in English-language schools was down by 40 percent in 1998.
The dwindling number of foreign applicants at these institutions has sparked fears that Australia’s universities might be facing a similar decline sometime in 1999.
— Chronicle of Higher Education
In March 1997, 18 vice chancellors from around the globe met in Sydney and formed an international network called Universitas 21 to respond to challenges posed by corporate universities and the Internet.
The delegates represented research universities from Australia, China, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Universitas 21 members include: Mcgill University; University of British Columbia; University of Toronto; University of Michigan; University of Birmingham; University of Edinburgh; University of Glasgow; University of Nottingham; National University of Singapore; University of Hong Kong; Peking University; Fudan University; University of Melbourne; University of New South Whales; University of Queensland; and University of Auckland.
By the next academic year, students will be able to freely transfer credits between member universities. In addition, Universitas 21 is currently exploring the possibility of forming links with corporate universities, which are formed by commercial enterprises to train and educate their employees.
British Aerospace, for instance, has teamed up with 79 universities and colleges in the United Kingdom to offer postgraduate degrees and qualifications in business administration.
— The Times Higher Education Supplement
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