Quality, Standards and Globalization in Higher Education

Higher education, science, and technology have always been international endeavors, but have acquired new dimensions and features in recent years. This paper describe these features in terms of some key characteristics of American higher education – general education at the undergraduate level, organized graduate schools, and the expansion of the private sector. As these features spread through the world, they are accompanied by two drives that may seem contradictory – to deregulate higher education, and to create universal standards for the certification of competencies. In the end, the paper discusses some implications of these trends for the receiving countries. The spreading of the Western canon Since its inception, in the European Middle Ages, higher education has been an international endeavor, with students and scholars traveling to the old universities of Paris, Bologna, Salamanca, and Uppsala, teaching and learning similar contents, and using Latin as a common language. In the 19 and early 20 century, Western universities spread to other parts of the world, whether part of colonial enterprises, as in India, or by initiative of countries, as in Japan and in Latin America. The assumption was that modern science, professional education, and technology, as developed in the Western world, were universal assets that countries could only ignore at their own peril. After the Second World War, as higher education expanded, international exchanges also intensified, fostered by the work of national and international cooperation agencies, private foundations, and national governments. Along the 20 1 century, Germany, France, England and the United States, and for a period the Soviet Union, disputed the dominance of international higher education and scientific cooperation, attracting foreign students, sending their scholars abroad, and providing models and technical assistance for the creation or transformation of universities into modern institutions, according to what we could call, at the risk of over-simplification, the “Western canon”. As we enter the 21 century, this secular trend persists, with three important peculiarities: the transformation of the classic universities into massive systems of higher education; the growing, worldwide dominance of the American model of higher education; and the transformation of science, technology and education into a large business sector, the “knowledge economy”. Underlying these three elements is the worldwide phenomena of globalization, characterized, among other things, by the growth of international trade, the breakdown of communication barriers, and the emergence of the United States as the world’s economic and military superpower. In this presentation, I would like to make some comments on the interplay between these three elements, in the present context of globalization. The adoption of Western models of higher education, scientific research, and technology in other parts of the world was always fraught with problems and tensions. Only a few, small countries were able to establish the Western canon in full, in the organization of their education and research institutions, and in the modernization of their economies. In other places, it led to the creation of small, westernized institutions coexisting with many others that, on the surface, adopted the trappings of Western universities, without however incorporating their values and culture. The hope was that, on time, the benefits of Western modernization would spread to society as a whole, and the tensions and differences between the “modern” and the “traditional” sectors would disappear. There were also alternative proposals, coming from intellectuals and political movements, to foster the development of local alternatives to the Western canon, based, for instance, on the Confucian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindi, or Pre-Colombian cultural and religious traditions, which could absorb the advances of Western science and technology without shattering the fabric of local cultures. It is fair to say, however, that